Showmax film ‘Glasshouse’ to premiere in top film festival

Streaming platform Showmax’s latest film Glasshouse is receiving international recognition from top film festivals.

Glasshouse has been selected for the 25th Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal, Canada. The film festival runs from 5-25 August 2021. Fantasia is recognised as one of North America’s top genre film festivals, and Glasshouse hopes to continue to cause some stir abroad.

With a young talented cast, the film stars British actress Jessica Alexander who will appear in the Disney live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, Anja Taljaard as sisters Bee and Evie and Bafta-nominated Hilton Pelser.

Glasshouse follows how humanity tries to survive after ‘The Shred’ – airborne dementia leaving many people lost and unable to remember who they are.

But there is a selected few who have survived in an airtight glasshouse. The family remains close-knit until the sisters decide to shelter a stranger as one of them starts falling in love with him.

The man starts unravelling the family’s history of rituals that they’ve tried to hide for years.

Alexander was quite pleased to share the first stills from the movie.

“I had the pleasure of shooting last year in South Africa with an incredible ensemble cast & master-mind writer/director @kelsey.egan – you’ve never seen anything like this I promise,” she posted.

Watch the trailer below:

This is a feature film directorial debut for Kelsey Egan. She said finally being able to direct her first feature film has been “dramatic irony” since she has made multiple short films since 2008.

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Kelsey says the Glasshouse “explores two opposing coping mechanisms to trauma, holding tightly to the past as a form of preservation, and willful forgetting.”

Shot in a Victorian glasshouse that had been inaccessible in the Eastern Cape since 1881, Emma Lungiswa de Wet, the associate producer, calls the place “the perfect setting for a story about memory: a colonial relic at once fragile and persistent.” 

Candice Fangueiro, head of content at Showmax , says Glasshouse is a “claustrophobic, thought-provoking story of family survival and buried secrets.

“We’re delighted the film is having its world premiere at Fantasia, the latest in a string of coups for South African films this year.”

The SA streaming service says the film is their first of its kind, a three-picture dystopian developed with Local Motion Pictures, in association with Crave Pictures, and with Egan directing. 

Glasshouse will be released on BoxOffice in DStv and available to rent on PVRs only in South Africa, as well as in countries on the African continent where BoxOffice is available. Glasshouse will stream on Showmax from February 2022. 

Compiled by Sandisiwe Mbhele