From Dust
We Spin

Director’s Statement

Sometimes there are cracks in harsh social systems where the light gets in.

Sometimes there are cracks in harsh social systems where the light gets in.

Mark was driving me to location on a previous production when he let some gossip slip: another driver had been spinning the van on weekends. Spinning? I had no idea what he was on about. He described a world of screeching tyres, stripped-down cars and drivers hanging out of them, then told me about Slip and Slide, the backyard school he runs for local kids, where he teaches them to fall in love with cars instead of the gangs and drugs that court them on the Cape Flats. Mark winked. Maybe your next documentary.

I'm drawn to broken systems and the people inside them who somehow create openings. I asked Mark to introduce me to his students. One of them was Logan, his only female spinner. She was so slight and sheepish that it was hard to imagine her behind the wheel of a spin car.We began shooting, and Logan hardly spoke. So, to fill the screen time, we pointed the camera elsewhere and dissected the whole world: politicians making empty promises to legalize the sport, organizers searching for sanctioned spaces to spin, authorities trying to contain the disorder. But over our eighteen months of filming, I found myself constantly pulled back towards this quiet, brewing Spinner, Logan.

And the closer I became with Logan, and Mark, the less interested I was in explaining the world around them and the more interested I was in what was happening within them and between them. Both carried grief. Both were, in different ways, trapped by a past they couldn't simply drive away from. Yet, through this unlikely relationship, and this unlikely sport, each seemed to be giving the other permission to move.

That became the film.

Visually, I wanted the film to carry the texture of its title: raw, elemental. Working with cinematographer Jacques Naudé, we wanted to experience spinning from within rather than observe it safely from the sidelines. We rigged cameras into and onto cars, used high-speed photography and drones, and searched for the beauty hidden inside what at first appears chaotic. When I rode inside the car of veteran spinner Eddie Rasta, my connection to the sport changed completely. From outside the car, spinning can look reckless. From inside, I felt something closer to precision, trust and surrender. It was a spiritual experience. The driver has to remain utterly present. "Constantly flowing," as Logan puts it.

Mark taught us that once a spinner masters the figure-eight, the "infinity move", they can do almost anything in a car. That became our true north. It guided Rebecca Adorno's edit, informed the original score and ultimately gave us the emotional trajectory of the film: At the beginning, Logan describes herself as being at "zero." Infinity became the opposite pole of her journey. And somewhere between the two sat Mark, teaching Logan how to move forward while carrying a past he had never fully released.

So we started out making a film about an outlawed sport. It became a film about the strange ways in which helping another person find their freedom can loosen the cycles that bind us too.