Castle Milk Stout takes its time

Sometimes, shooting a film in black and white is simply shorthand for 'artsy', but with his new film for Castle Milk Stout from agency Joe Public, Zee Ntuli shows a mastery of the monochrome.

Produced through Darling Films, This is African Time expresses the idea of spending moments wisely, using unique framing and ramped-up editing to play out its theories. The script sees a wise old-timer describe ‘African time’ to a younger man as they savour a slow glass of stout together.

“Do you mean we are always late?" asks the youngster: “Not late, just… not rushed... it’s about moments not minutes,” says the oldster. And as the montage slows to depict periods of joy and human contact, the lyrical voiceover extols the virtues of not seeing time as something measured and ruled by the clock, but as something that just gently passes. 

Kudos to Julian Robinet for the classy cinematography. Ntuli also invited fellow Darling Films SA director and  photographer Ross Garrett into the creative process from the very beginning. Together they developed a visual language where still photography wasn't simply supporting the film, it became one of its central storytelling devices. One of the earliest ideas was to use light itself as a measure of time. Throughout the film, moving shafts of sunlight slowly travel across faces, architecture and empty spaces. Rather than using clocks to tell us time is passing, the light quietly does the work, becoming a recurring visual reminder that time is always moving, whether we notice it or not. Over 300 stills were shot for this film.

Across the production they experimented with long exposures, several different film formats, motion blur and a variety of in-camera techniques that allowed single frames to feel strangely alive. The photographs weren't designed to interrupt the moving image. They became part of its emotional rhythm, quietly blurring the line between stillness and motion.