LOVE, YOUR NEIGHBOUR (2023)
Logline: In this wry love letter to South African suburbia, a local filmmaker attempts to connect with his upmarket neighbours through their intercom systems, starting conversations about guard dogs, racial profiling and home security.
Synopsis: A filmmaker returns to his family home in Durban, South Africa to isolate during a nationwide lockdown. He soon realises that his upmarket neighbourhood has always been isolated. Lifelong neighbours remain incognito behind tall walls outlined by high voltage electric fences. Each fortress is watched by home CCTV cameras; the perimeters patrolled by private security guards. The only sign of his neighbours' existence is a "Crime Watch" WhatsApp group. Originally designed to build a more vigilant community, the group has been reduced to a toxic chatroom for second hand junk, racial profiling, conspiracy, paranoia and an ongoing polemic against the city's cutest inhabitants: the indigenous Vervet Monkey. In order to get to know his neighbours beyond their WhatsApp digits, the filmmaker leaves the confines of his walls to make contact the only way he can: through the intercoms.

Festivals: IDFA Competition for Youth Documentary (World Premiere, 2023), Brussels Short Film Festival (2024), Joburg Film Festival (2024), FESCAAAL (Milan, 2024), Millennium Docs Against Gravity (Warsaw, 2024), IndieLisboa International Competition (2024), Encounters International Documentary Festival (South Africa, 2024).
©Jethrowestraad. Directed by Jethro Westraad. Production DocNomads. Poster designed by Andres Silva.
Click the images below to read the articles written about the film. 
Below you'll find some still frames taken from the film.