Future Tense
2026

Future Tense

Australian Premiere.

Lwando (Lawrence Maleka) and Tara (Kristen Raath), a young couple in Cape Town’s grim near-future, take a time-travelling holiday to 1647. But what starts out as a romantic getaway soon becomes a battle for a better future for South Africa in director Jenna Cato Bass’ TIFF-debuting reckoning with genocidal history.

Director

Jenna Cato Bass

Runtime

96 Minutes

Country

Australia, South Africa

Classification

Unclassified 15+

Falling somewhere between The Terminator (1984) and La Jetée (1962), Good Madam (2021) director Jenna Cato Bass’ riveting, near-future Cape Town-set romantic thriller thrusts a young couple – Lwando (Lawrence Maleka) and Tara (Kristen Raath) – into a fraught speculative fiction. Their world is swiftly dying, but the privileged few can use time-travel technology to holiday in the distant, pre-industrial past. Tara, a teacher, is psyched for them to chill out in their closely monitored holiday home in 1647. But Lwando has other ideas. A proud Black man, he intends to break free and head to Table Bay, where the Dutch crew of the Haarlem will shortly be shipwrecked. Can he prevent them from setting in motion the colonial violence that inexorably leads to apartheid? Which side will Tara choose? That’s the tantalising promise of TIFF hit Future Tense, brim-full of big ideas and similarly visually rich, thanks to fabulous location work shot by cinematographer Jared Paisley.

Toronto

Film Credits

Director

Jenna Cato Bass

Year

2026

Country

Australia & South Africa

Language

Afrikaans, Dutch, English & Xhosa

Subtitles

English

Type

Feature Fiction

Program Strand

Late Night

Producer

Kristina Ceyton, Samantha Jennings & Hisham Samie

Writer

Jenna Cato Bass

Cinematographer

Jared Paisley

Editor

Jacques de Villiers

Cast

Kristen Raath, Lawrence Maleka & Qondiswa James

Film Source

Maslow Entertainment

Genre

BIPOC, Drama, Sci-Fi & Thriller

Filmmakers in attendance, 16 October.

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