ADAM (2025)
An introduction by Murray Hines, followed by an essay on the brutality and beauty of making a movie by Winford Collings.
It is easy to sit in a Cape Town café and tell your friends that you want to make a movie. It is an entirely different thing to do it. When I met Winford Collings and Liyema Speelman 4 and 5 years ago, respectively, I was inspired by the way they spoke about film - the texture, the sound, the space of it - and how it had shaped them. Now, years later, I can log on to Showmax at any moment of the day to see an object that sucked the time and the creation from their hands to make a real thing in the world. Their film, ADAM, which was written by Collings and co-directed by Collings and Speelman, tells a deeply South African story of land, masculinity and lineage. It attempts to understand how the disruptive forces of compassion and kindness can break a bad thing. I recommend it strongly!
Here, in an essay about the experience of making ADAM by Winford Collings, who lays bare the brutality and beauty of making a movie:
ADAM
My first feature film - “ADAM” - is officially on Showmax, almost 10 years after I first wrote it. It is no longer mine; it now belongs to all who’ll see it, and to the 50+ incredible filmmakers who willed it into being. I wrote it at the end of matric, coming out of a boarding school experience that I struggled to grapple with, marked by interactions with people that I couldn’t understand. And so I wrote to understand them, and myself, contextualise them, and myself. I was certain that those five years would dictate the rest of my life.
I’m not sure how much of it has seeped into my life ten years later. The film itself has morphed and shapeshifted over time, as I’ve grown, and maybe that’s one marker. Some of the changes came from a better understanding of life, especially when it came to writing the adult characters, and some out of necessity. ADAM was originally written as a courtroom drama, jumping between the courtroom in the present and the Bush School in the past. But when we realised that the story in the past was the strongest thread, we pivoted. As I learned, a lot of filmmaking is pivoting. About gritting your teeth, steeling your spine, and pivoting.
My first day ever on a film set was the first day of shooting ADAM. That’s not the way it should work, and for good reason, as I soon learnt. There is nothing particularly prestigious about making a film. It is all limbs and muscle and sinew and pulling and walking. My eight kilograms lost during filming can attest to this. It is construction.
Psychologically, every missed line from an actor feels like a personal failure. A pox on your life and lineage. Running out of time for a scene or having to scrap a shot you’d planned will make you want to fall to your knees, dig them into the gravel for extra measure, and willingly offer up your bare back to God so that you can be eternally branded as a Dunce. A purveyor of and foremost expert in Duncery. So that for time eventual, all may say, and rightly acknowledge: “There goes the Dunce, duncing duncingly on his merry dunce way”.
During filming, I wouldn’t have recommended the film industry to anyone. I would've told you to take up something refined and meaningful, like painting, or training stray dogs to open ziplock bags. Something dignified. Practical. Of purpose.
But, equally, when an actor breathes life into words written years prior, all of that fades away. The camera catches a flair, a glint in an eye, an unspoken secret between a mother and son. And you feel like maybe … maybe. And maybe! And you love it. Flailing limbs and all.
Finally, I can close the chapter on this film, and all it has meant to me, and accept that it will mean something different to everyone who comes across it. That’s the joy of it. Accepting that what you’ve created has an afterlife that is not yours to gatekeep or correct.
Similarly, when you live with characters for so long, you have to imagine their afterlives, lives that continue long after you’ve concluded your story with them. Adam, the young man, continues his life past the cut to black, and well into the credits. He has to, if only for my sake.
There are times when I am walking my dogs, or shopping for groceries, and I feel Adam or Carol or Liam or Susanna walk past me and I look up, but they’ve turned the corner, out of sight. And I regret having missed them, but I hope, more than anything, that as they walked past me, there was a glint of recognition in their eyes. Trying to place me but unable to, sure that they’ll obsess on it for the rest of the day, where do I know him from?. It may be brief. They may not let their eyes linger. But what is important to me is that they looked at all.
Winford Collings is a writer currently living in Cape Town.
A list of films and music that guided and informed the journey, and served as references for both the writing and filming of ADAM.
Beau Travail (1999). The blueprint. The starting point. The unattainable reference (for me, and all my favourite filmmakers). As Greta Gerwig said, “Beau Travail is the movie that made me understand cinema. It snapped into focus for me. That it’s things captured on film and put together through editing to create meaning beyond language. And it’s dance but it’s not dance. It’s theatre but it’s not theatre. It’s movement. It’s an art of montage”.
Claire Denis limns the impossibility of bodies, their weight and want, their reach and reaction, their muscle and memory. Any one descriptor fails to capture the gradations in its themes, the entire backstories that are communicated in a gaze or a pose - “their whole bodies contain the story” - and ultimately, the ability for it to find dance and rhythm and ballet and opera amid terror, war and death.
A few more films:
Come and See (1985)
Boyhood (2014)
The Harvesters (2018)
La Chimera (2023)
I made playlists for each of the characters, and this was the one song that appeared in all of them. If there’s a song that defines ADAM, that captures my feelings about it, that traces my journey since writing it, it’s this.
Maggie Rogers, singing almost a cappella, save for the chant of cicadas in the background, about a trip to the wilderness. Colours mark her experience: emerald leaves, a silver and purple twilight, a spangled black night. Her voice, haunting, isolated, carries the verses as if straining to locate a memory, ephemeral, of a person, or people, crepuscular, willing time to let them stay exactly as they are. Saying to the sun: keep doing what you’re doing, keep rising and setting, but let that not mark the passing of time. Let it be a flourish, a performance, only for us.
More music:
Class of 2013 - Mitski
These Days - Nico
Funeral - Phoebe Bridgers
The Wilhelm Scream - James Blake
Float On - Mark Kozelek
I Still Hear You - Adrienne Lenker
Begging for Rain - Maggie Rogers
Picture Me Better - Weyes Blood