The Story
One of the most dangerous cities on Earth. And one of the most loved.
We didn't go to Cape Town for the headlines. We went to speak with the people living in them. This is what they told us.
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We expected a story about crime.
We'd read what everyone reads. The carjackings, the gang territory, the kidnap warnings, the league tables that put Cape Town near the top of every list you don't want to be near the top of. We landed ready to film a hard story about a hard place.
What we found was a city full of people who refuse to let any of that have the last word — and a film that quietly, and quickly, became about them instead.
The crime doesn't define Cape Town.
The people who call it home do.
Over ten days, we were lucky enough to be given rare and generous access to the people holding the city together — a privilege we didn't take for granted, and one we worked hard not to waste.
We were invited to work alongside serving police officers, and with the private security teams who patrol the streets when the police can't be everywhere at once. We sat with former gang members who have walked away from that life, and with people in recovery from addiction who are walking away from another. We sat with community leaders, with parents, with neighbours and with shop owners. With ordinary men and women whose names will never be in a newspaper, but who, between them, are the reason their corner of Cape Town is still standing.
What connected them wasn't a single version of the city. It was a quiet, stubborn refusal to give up on it.
What we found was complicated. Often heavy. Sometimes unexpectedly funny. And far more hopeful than the news ever lets on.
There is a phrase that gets used a lot in South Africa — Ubuntu. It translates loosely as I am because we are. The idea that a person is only really a person through other people. We heard versions of that idea in almost every conversation we had — in the way people looked after each other, kept watch for each other, fed each other's children, forgave things they didn't have to forgive.
Hope, it turns out, doesn't disappear when life gets hard. Sometimes it is the only thing left. And in the people we met, it was every where.
We're Sam and Jamie — the two of us behind No Excuse Films, and the two of us you'll spend time with on screen.
We've been close friends a long time, and we came to filmmaking the long way round. One of us spent years as a UK police officer before becoming a producer and presenter. The other served as a Royal Marine Commando before becoming a videographer and director. Between us, we've seen more than our share of difficult days — though, we'll be the first to admit, nothing close to the weight some of the people we met in Cape Town carry every single day, without complaint and without much of a break.
What's changed us most, though, isn't either of those former careers. It's that we're both fathers now. Children waiting at home changes the way you sit with a story like this.
You stop counting what's broken.
You start paying attention to what people are still trying to protect.
The film was made through No Excuse Films, our UK production company. A small team. No big crew getting in the way of the conversation. No agenda we were trying to smuggle in.
Three things we promised ourselves before we boarded the plane, and held to from the first day to the last:
No sensationalism.
No shortcuts.
No excuses.
That's the company. That's how we work. And that, more than anything, is why people who don't normally talk to cameras sat down and talked to ours.
This isn't a crime documentary, though crime is in it. It isn't a tourism film, though Cape Town has rarely looked more itself. It isn't an exposé, and it isn't a lecture.
It is, in the end, a film about people. About one of the most complicated, beautiful, painful, brilliant cities in the world — told without flinching from any of it, and without losing sight of the hope that runs throughout it all.
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