HEINRICH DAHMS

Film Director / Screenwriter

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Please scroll down to view my BIO, CV, FILMOGRAPHY and a REVIEW of my old films by film critic Trevor Steele-Taylor at the bottom of this page.

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FAVORITE FILMS

Below are a few of my favourite films in no particular order. First the classics:

UN CONDAMNE A MORT S'EST ECHAPPE (Bresson), LA REGLE DU JEU (Renoir), LE JOUR SE LEVE (Carne), MODERN TIMES (Chaplin), JULES ET JIM (Truffaut), KNIFE IN THE WATER (Polanski), REPULSION (Polanski), AU BOUT DE SOUFFLE (Godard), ALPHAVILLE (Godard), LA DOLCE VITA (Fellini), 8 1/2 (Fellini), L'AVENTURA (Antonioni), THE PASSENGER (Antonioni), AMARCORD (Fellini), ROMA (Fellini), NORTH BY NORTHWEST (Hitchcock), VERTIGO (Hitchcock), IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (Capra), SEVEN SAMURAI (Kurosawa), RASHOMON (Kurosawa).

And some more recent classics:

SOLARIS (Tarkovski), CHINA TOWN (Polanski), BADLANDS; DAYS OF HEAVEN (Malick), BETTY BLUE (Beineix), CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (Spielberg), BLADE RUNNER (Scott), TERMINATOR I and II (Cameron), THE MATRIX (those brothers), THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY (Weir), APOCOLYPSE NOW (Copolla), THE GODFATHER I and II (Copolla), CROUCHING TIGER, SLEEPING DRAGON (Lee), BLUE VELVET (Lynch), PULP FICTION (Tarantino), CHUNKING EXPRESS / FALLEN ANGELS (Wong Kar Wei). I also like the work of Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou and Takeshi Kitano. Recent favourites also include the films of Bruno Dumont (FLANDRES, etc.).

BIOGRAPHY

After a year in Medical School, I switched to the Arts (Political Philosophy, Psychology and English Literature) and graduated in 1977 with a BA Honors in Political Philosophy and Cinema. It was here, in my second year at university, that I launched my 'career in film': Some friends and I (all film buffs and fervent members of the local film society) bought an old 16mm hand-cranked Bolex and started to make movies on reversal stock, mostly featuring friends and drama students. I also wrote my first two feature-length screenplays in my undergraduate years.

In 1980, I was offered a job as general assistant to an award-winning documentary filmmaker and learnt a bit about everything: directing, camera, sound recording and editing. After that I joined a major South African film studio, SATBEL, as documentary Director/Cameraman. In the first year I made about fifty 35mm theatrical newsreels and directed several documentaries. I then bought my own 16mm camera and went freelance. From that time until about 1990, I made a very wide range of social and commercial documentaries, while also writing a number of high-concept feature screenplays, most of which I sold to producers in South Africa and Hollywood. Also in that period, I worked as Assistant Director on several major TV Series and Dramas, and line-produced numerous commercials, a TV Film of the Week, and two TV Dramas. After 1985, I wrote and directed two TV Drama series and three feature films, CITY WOLF (my tribute to Godard's "Au Bout de Souffle"), DUNE SURFER and AU PAIR aka MY DAUGHTER'S KEEPER (MIRAMAX, 1993) featuring Portuguese actress Ana Padrao and Nicholas Guest.

My continuing education includes a two-year part-time course in method acting in the Strassberg system with Alex von Learmont, numerous screenwriting and directing master classes, and the European Producer's Master Class in Madrid in 1996.

After the successful launch of MY DAUGHTER'S KEEPER at AFM in 1991, I relocated to the island of Sao Miguel, the Azores, to dedicate time to writing. In late 1993, I moved to the Netherlands and developed several film and TV projects with European partners.

In 1998, I began to develop an Internet broadcasting startup, BUZZBYTES.COM, which was launched in 2000 with own and Venture Capital. Buzzbytes became a thriving niche community for BUZZ marketers, and I produced and directed 10 documentaries on best-selling marketing gurus, including SETH GODIN, and PEPPERS & ROGERS. In the same period, I also wrote a number of new screenplays. At the end of 2002, I sold the startup to return to cinema fulltime.

FILMOGRAPHY (Writer / Director)

• A Man No Less (1985, TV Drama Series, 7 x 36 minutes)
• The Young Doctor Nxumalo (1986, TV Drama Series, 13 x 36 minutes)
• City Wolf (1987 feature, Atlas International, 90 minutes)
• Dune Surfer (1988 feature, MovieWorld, 90 minutes)
• The Last Samurai (1989 feature, Directed Post Production, 90 minutes)
• Au Pair a.k.a. My Daughter's Keeper (1991 feature, Miramax, 90 minutes)
• Overleven (Survival) (NL 2007, 50 min, Drama BUZZMEDIA NETWORK)
• SCHOFT (SCUM) (NL 2009, 93 min, Feature Film BUZZMEDIA NETWORK)
• THE PROPHET, THE PEOPLE & THE PERLEMOEN (NL 2011, 24 min, Short Documentary for BUZZMEDIA NETWORK)

           FILM & TV SCREENPLAYS (Writer)

• - Various TV & Corporate Documentaries (1981-1986)
• - The Kaizer Chiefs Story (1986, for Toron International)
  
• - Dune Surfer (1986, for Movie World)
  
• - A Man No Less (1986, 7-Part Series for Movie World TV)
  
• - The Young Doctor Nxumalo (1987, 13-Part Series for Movie World TV)
  
• - City Wolf (1987, for Atlas International)
• - Windprints (1987, Channel Four, Co-writer with David Wicht)
  
• - Midnight Boogie (1988, Sold to Sherry Snelling, Hollywood)
  
• - Ultra Marine (1989, Sold to Wayne Crawford, Hollywood)
  
• - The Spirit Flies (1989, for Toron International, South Africa)
  
• - Au Pair (1990, for TransAtlantic/Miramax)
  
• - Cliff Hanger (1990)
  
• - Conditions of Silence (1992, Sold to IRIS Audiovisuals, Portugal)
  
• - Another Day of Life (1993, based on book by Ryszard Kapuscinski)
  
• - Various TV Projects (1994-97, with Audiovisuelle GmbH and Memphis Films) 
  
• - Into the Fire (1996, Spec)
  
• - Four Times Across the Channel (1997, for Big River, Amsterdam)
  
• - An Amsterdam Tale (1998/99, Co-writer, Amsterdam)
  
• - Famine (2002, Feature)
  
• - Never Surrender (2002, Feature)
  
• - Heart (2003, Feature in Development)
• - Having Maria (2003, Romantic Comedy)
• - Overleven (Survival) (2007, Drama)
• - Entropy (2007, Drama)
• - Schoft (Scum) (2010, Feature film)
• - Heroes of the Abalone Wars (2012, Script for a full-length documentary)

FILM REVIEW

Excerpt from

"MOVIES, MOGULS, MAVERICKS: South African Cinema 1979-1991"

Edited by Johan Blignaut and Martin Botha

HEINRICH DAHMS: Signs and Psychotics

Written by Trevor Steele-Taylor

Heinrich Dahms (born 1954) entered the film industry after studying Philosophy And Linguistics at Cape Town and Witwatersrand Universities. After working as a cameraman in documentaries and television, he made his first feature film us a 'quickie' for distribution in Germany. After a few title changes, the film, which was written in a hurry by Dahms, was entitled City Wolf (1987). Essentially a vehicle for popular German leading-man, Manfred Seipoldt, the film's distribution in South Africa has been limited to video.

Although betraying the haste of its genesis, City Wolf is, in concept, an existential thriller of considerable brilliance. A down-at-heel cabaret performer (Sean Taylor), who specializes in stream-of-consciousness, boozy monologues in the Tom Waits/Charles Bukowski mode, accidentally kills the owner of a cabaret venue after an altercation. Trapped in an escalating cycle of cause and effect, Johnny accepts the next step, which is to escape - in this case by means of the dead man's Porsche.'Go Johnny, go Johnny, go Johnny, go!'

On the road, Johnny picks up a German news cameraman (Seipoldt), whose kombi has broken down. At the first filling station, Johnny, whose pictures are now in the newspapers, blasts the petrol attendant as the latter tries to telephone the police. The cameraman films the murder. Here follows the fascinating situation of a psychotic survivor, knowing that he is going for broke, taking the media along with him to record every station of the cross of his demise.

Part road movie, part existential thriller, part rock movie, City Wolf falls absolutely to pieces in an ending, which Dahms had foisted on him by producer pressure. The moral inherent in this ending unfortunately belies the journey, as Johnny, without remorse, mumbles his way through reminiscences of the extreme actions perpetrated by his screen heroes, Dennis Hopper and John Belushi. The imperturbable pressman records all of this with a look of benign resignation.

Along the way, Johnny's brief romantic interlude with a singer (Dominique Moser) gives rise to some desperate sex and a clever song, 'Two computers talking. Basic is the language...the language of love.'

Surprisingly, for a country as vast as South Africa with its long tracts of road, City Wolf is South Africa's only road movie in the classic convention of the genre - although Andrew Worsdale's Shot Down (1988) and Charles Briggs' Backtrack (1989) do have elements thereof. Dahms has a feel for the road that is not intuitive (as did Ford, Peckinpah, and Hopper). His is a post-modern appreciation, informed by the 'poets of the road'; but he is definitely a signs and meanings man of the Wenders school.

As Johnny's tracts of road can he read as a journey around Johnny's own mind, the protagonist in Dahms' next film Dune Surfer(1989), defines himself in terms of the forever shifting dunes of Namibia. At one point the dune-surfing hippie interloper is told by a drunken townsman – ‘A man's got to know his place in the world, Matey' - a concept that is further underlined by deeply psychotic Ben Maartens (Philip Brown) telling the dune-riding Carl (Tod Jensen) 'This is God's country...the colour of blood...it is a place to come to die...'

With great economy, Dahms defines the place, the characters and the characters’ place in the film’s opening. From above, the dunes look like the ripples of a woman’s body until Carl is seen riding the curves on his dune board. The psychotic Ben is first encountered circling Carl, his rifle ready. This circling will again be used with the camera when Carl and Ben’s wife, Annie, make love among the dunes. Annie is first seen furtively looking out through a closed glass door.

This skillful definition of character is unfortunately not sustained into interesting characterization, nor into a development of the worn jealousy triangle that obsesses them. Carl, the 'free-living' dune-surfer is a superficial cipher, while the psychotic Ben enters on too high a note and leaves on too low a one. The penultimate scene of Ben having Carl not only in the sights of his rifle, but also in the jaws of his dog and then relenting owing to a cacophony of voice-overs - is unfortunate.

As the woman between, Nancy Mulford underplays her underdeveloped part - she is the dunes, which Carl rides and to which Ben clings - she is the landscape.

Dahms makes the most of his vast locations - from the helicopter swooping over the undulating dunes, to a disturbing kudu chase, to a sad and seedy vastrap (a traditional Boer dance similar to the quickstep) at the local pub. The film is, despite American accents, Namibian in feel and sense.

Strangely, it is a sense of place that Dahms' Au Pair (1990) lacks. Beginning in London but then moving to Mozambique (all too obviously shot in Durban), the film's real landscape is an interior one. A successful thriller writer (Nicholas Guest) joins his wife (Jocelyn Broderick), a foreign correspondent, on an assignment in Mozambique. To care for their small child, who suffers from nightmares after a fall off a swing, they employ a Portuguese au pair, named Rosa (Ana Padrao). Rosa’s murky past and the writer's sexual manipulation of her lead, ultimately, to a bloody outburst. As Dahms avoids the more obvious pitfalls of the thriller genre, Rosa is accorded a good deal of sympathy. The genre demands that she be the villainess and that the writer and his wife be the family in peril. However, by inference, it is Rosa who is the victim to the desires and expectations of the families she works for.

Scenes of Rosa's pain - her bare foot standing on broken chips of a cup, or holding her stomach after a suicide attempt - set her apart from the casual cruelties of the family unit. Her desire for a child is contextualized within the unit that includes one. Her own pregnancy, her hysterectomy and her hysterical pregnancy all work against her because she is outside the closed family circle.

Dahms uses a reflective, circular structure. From a barrage of quick cutting at the beginning, the film establishes the boundaries - the lone woman and the child, the desire and the desired. The scene in a hospital lift with the child, after her fall, and Rosa who is there for her hysterectomy, provides the moment of recognition, as well as a mirror to the future when Rosa is wheeled into another hospital lift, having 'terminated' her hysterical pregnancy.

With good performances (especially from Ana Padrao), and a taut style, Au Pair further establishes Dahms as a talented film stylist.