READ AN INTERVIEW WITH WRITER-DIRECTOR SHAMIM SARIF

Short Synopsis
In 1950's South Africa, apartheid is just beginning. Free-spirited Amina (Sheetal Sheth) has broken all the rules of her own conventional Indian community, and the new apartheid-led government, by running a café with Jacob, her 'colored' business partner. When she meets Miriam (Lisa Ray), a young traditional wife and mother, their unexpected attraction pushes Miriam to question the rules that bind her. As Amina helps Miriam's sister-in-law to hide from the police, a chain of events is set in motion that changes both women forever.
In a system that divides white from black and women from men, what chance is there for an unexpected love to survive?
From overcoming oppression to finding personal freedom, from the hardships of a loveless marriage to the hesitant joy of an unexpected love affair, "The World Unseen" transports the viewer to a vibrant, colorful world that is universal in its themes. 

The Film
Shamim Sarif has brought to the screen the motion picture adaptation of her critically acclaimed and award winning debut novel, "The World Unseen." The human drama is inspired by stories of her grandmother's life in South Africa during the 1950's when the root of Apartheid began its treacherous grip on the country, leaving individuals to deal with a long fight for independence and identity.   
The early apartheid setting "forms the backdrop for a story of very universal human emotions," says producer Hanan Kattan.
The international cast is headed up by Canadian actress Lisa Ray (Deepa Mehta's "Water" - which garnered a Best Foreign Picture Academy Award® nomination in 2007). Her performance in "Water" earned her the Best Actress Award from the Vancouver Film Critics Circle.
Other cast includes Sheetal Sheth ("Looking for Comedy in the Moslem World"), Parvin Dabas ("Monsoon Wedding"), Bernard White ("The Matrix") and Nandana Sen ("Black"). Among the stellar South African cast are Grethe Fox, David Dennis, Natalie Becker, Rajesh Gopie and Colin Moss.

Production and Financing
Written, directed, financed and produced entirely by women, the motion picture is an Enlightenment Productions film, in association with DO Productions. Producer Hanan Kattan (co-founder of UK's Enlightenment Productions with Shamim Sarif), and co-producer Brigid Olen (co-founder of South Africa's DO Productions with Marlow de Mardt) have teamed up on this project along with associate producer Daisy Allsop.
Many of the heads of department are also women, including Carole Prentice (line producer), Tanya Van Tonder (production designer), Danielle Knox (wardrobe designer) and Ronelle Loots (editor).
"The strong female presence on this movie wasn't something we actively sought out," explains Sarif, "but there was a passion for the story and its themes that has driven everyone who's chosen to be involved with 'The World Unseen' and that has helped the movie to surpass even our high expectations for it."
The production is independently financed by private equity, and Katherine Priestley and Lisa Tchenguiz-Imerman serve as Executive Producers.  Says Priestley, "I believe that, like the book, the film will reach out to a very wide audience. It's about individualism, about integrity, about believing in yourself."
Enlightenment Productions' mandate is to achieve higher than expected production value for the budgets involved, by tapping into the excitement and creativity of cast and crew who are passionate about their projects. By combining manageable budgets with excellent quality scripts and top class execution, Enlightenment is dedicated to growing their slate organically and found a like-minded partner in DO Productions.
"Since we founded DO Productions we have consistently sought out quality stories, with edge, in which to invest time and energy," says Olen, who this year, was also the South African co-producer on "Disgrace" starring John Malkovich. 
This film was made with the assistance of the National Film and Video Foundation of South Africa.

THE NOVEL
When Sarif's novel, "The World Unseen," first hit the shelves it took the publishing world by storm and went on to win the Pendleton May First Novel Award and the prestigious Betty Trask Award, garnering significant acclaim from the critics. 
"An impressive debut, Sarif's story brings together the descriptive power of the novelist with the screenwriter's mastery of dialogue." (The Times, London)
"I read The World Unseen at a gulp, so entrancing is its style, so complete its tale of love and betrayal, and so accurate its depiction of the physical, social and political scene." (The Star, South Africa - Book of the Week)
"The characters shine with the beauty of Sarif's deceptively skilful prose which keeps your eyes skating along the narrative in sheer enjoyment. I read this book in two long sittings, unable to put it down." (Dyverse)
"Like the novel, The World Unseen cannot be boxed into any category," assert Kattan.  "It embraces timeless themes of love, prejudice, finding your voice and lessons of the heart and has a firm place in world cinema. It is a passionate & provocative story that embodies Enlightenment Productions' ethos of developing stories that challenge convention."   
The World Unseen marks the second motion picture directed by Sarif.  Her directorial debut "I Can't Think Straight", which she also wrote and directed, was completed and released in 2008.

"The World Unseen" - Director's Statement
The World Unseen is about integrity, about finding your strength, about passion. I've been incredibly fortunate to work with my producer, Hanan Kattan, and Executive Producers Katherine Priestley and Lisa Tchenguiz-Imerman, who all embody those qualities themselves. It made the making of this film as smooth a process as it ever can be. 
The events of the story are set in a very specific time and place - South Africa, in the 1950s, within the subtle hierarchies of the Indian community - but the tribulations and triumphs of its characters are universal. All of us have fallen in love; we have all experienced injustice of a sort, whether within political systems or within our own families; we have all understood integrity and aspired to it.   
This is a world where the desires of women are not traditionally seen or heard; but the story uncovers them, hesitantly at first, and then proudly.  This delicacy of emotion has been beautifully portrayed by Lisa Ray and the rest of the cast. 
The setting of the film provided a rich tapestry of images and sound - from the breathtaking yet oppressively vast landscape around Miriam's solitary shop, to the vibrant colors and jazz music of Amina's cafe. 
I hope that, like all the stories we remember and love the most, "The World Unseen"  evokes our longings and ultimately satisfies them - for it is an exuberant story, full of hope and triumph that are all the more meaningful for the obstacles that our characters have needed to overcome.

READ MORE:  SHAMIM SARIF TALKS ABOUT THE WORLD UNSEEN

Apartheid and Indian minority in South Africa
Apartheid (meaning separateness in Afrikaans, cognate to English apart and -hood) was a system of legalized racial segregation enforced by the National Party government of South Africa between 1948 and 1994. Apartheid had its roots in the history of colonization and settlement of southern Africa, with the development of practices and policies of separation along racial lines and domination by European settlers and their descendents. Following the general election of 1948, the National Party set in place its program of Apartheid, with the formalization and expansion of existing policies and practices into a system of institutionalized racism, and incidental Afrikaner domination. Apartheid was dismantled in a series of negotiations from 1990 to 1993, culminating in elections in 1994, the first in South Africa with universal suffrage. The legacies of apartheid still shape South African politics and society.

Colored classification
The population was classified into four groups: Black, White, Indian, and Colored. (These terms are capitalized to denote their legal definitions in South African law).

South African Blacks were stripped of their citizenship, legally becoming citizens of one of ten tribally based and nominally self-governing bantustans (tribal homelands), four of which became nominally independent states. The homelands occupied relatively small and economically unproductive areas of the country. The government based the homelands on the territory of Black Reserves founded during the British Empire period, akin to the US Indian Reservation, Canadian First Nations reserves, or Australian aboriginal reserves. Many black South Africans, however, never resided in their identified "homelands". The homeland system disenfranchised black people residing in "white South Africa" by restricting their voting rights to their own identified black homeland. The government segregated education, medical care, and other public services; black people ended up with services greatly inferior to those of whites, and, to a lesser extent, to those of Indians and coloreds. The black education system was designed to prepare blacks for lives as a laboring class. There was a deliberate policy in "white South Africa" of making services for black people inferior to those of whites, to try to "encourage" black people to move into the black homelands.

The Colored group included people of mixed Bantu, Khoisan, and European descent (with some Malay ancestry, especially in the Western Cape). The Apartheid bureaucracy devised complex (and often arbitrary) criteria at the time that the Population Registration Act was implemented to determine who was 'Colored.' Minor officials would administer tests to determine if someone should be categorized either Colored or Black, or if another person should be categorized either Colored or White. Different members of the same family found themselves in different race groups. Further tests determined membership of the various sub-racial groups of the Coloreds. Many of those who formerly belonged to this racial group are opposed to the continuing use of the term "colored" in the post-apartheid era, though the term no longer signifies any legal meaning. The expressions 'so-called Colored' (Afrikaans sogenaamde Kleurlinge) and 'brown people' (bruin mense) acquired a wide usage in the 1980s.
coloreds were as a matter of state policy forced to live in separate townships -- in some cases leaving homes their families had occupied for generations -- and received an inferior education, though better than that provided to Black South Africans. They played an important role in the struggle against apartheid: for example the African Political Organization established in 1902 had an exclusively colored membership.
Voting rights were denied to Coloreds in the same way that they were denied to blacks from 1950 to 1983.

Indian South Africans
Indian South African is a term for people who arrived in South Africa from colonial India.
The first batch of Indians came on board the Truro in 1860. They were followed by others who were also imported as indentured laborers to work on the Sugarcane plantations of Natal. The rest are descended from Indian traders who migrated to South Africa shortly afterwards, many from the Gujarat and Rajasthan area. KwaZuluNatal's largest city, Durban, has the largest Asian population in sub-Saharan Africa. South Africa as a whole has one of the largest population of Indian descent. Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi worked from 1893 as a lawyer in South Africa in the then Colony of Natal, and the Transvaal Republic, where the city of Pretoria is located.

Life during Apartheid
Discriminated against by Apartheid legislation like the Group Areas Act, applied in 1950, Indians were forcibly moved into Indian townships, and had their movements restricted. They were not allowed to reside in the Orange Free State, and needed special permission to enter that province. They were also, as a matter of state policy, given an inferior education compared to white South Africans. The Asiatic Land Tenure and the Indian Representative Act of 1946 were repealed.
In 1961, the Department of Indian Affairs was established, with a white minister in charge. In 1968, the South African Indian Council came into being, serving as a link between the government and the Indian people.
The University of Durban-Westville (now part of the University of KwaZulu-Natal) was built with a dollar-for-dollar or Rand-for-Rand contribution from Indians and the government in the 1970s, so that Indian students would not have to brave the waters by taking a ferry to Salisbury Island's abandoned prison that served as their university until then.
Indians in South Africa were (and sometimes still are) referred to by the racial epithet 'coolie' by racists. In cricket, for example, a ball which fails to bounce is known as a "coolie creeper".
In 1983, the Constitution was reformed to allow the Colored and Indian minorities a limited participation in separate and subordinate Houses of a tricameral Parliament, a development which enjoyed limited support. The Indian house was called the House of Delegates. Some aspects of Indian life were regulated by this house, including education. The theory was that the Indian minority could be allowed limited rights, but the Black majority was to become citizens of independent homelands. These separate arrangements were removed by the negotiations which took place from 1990 to provide all South Africans with the vote.

Notable Indian South Africans
    * Mahatma Gandhi* started his career in law and also the freedom struggle against the British rule while living in South Africa. While Gandhi began his career in law while living in South Africa, he was born and spent his formative years in India and spent a majority of his life fighting the British rule in India. Therefore, he would be considered an Indian with an exposure to South Africa.
    * Frene Ginwala the first Speaker of the National Assembly of the Parliament of the Republic of South Africa
    * Saleem Mukuddem - Cricket player who represented Bermuda in the 2007 Cricket World Cup
    * Fatima Meer (28 August 1928 - ) is a South African writer and academic, a screenwriter, and was a prominent anti-apartheid activist
    * Ahmed Deedat - Revered Muslim mullah, known throughout the Muslim world and the west.
    * Ahmed Kathrada - Nelson Mandela's fellow inmate at Robben Island for 27 years and confidante. Katharda was one of the Rivonia Trial defendants.
    * Hashim Amla - first player of East Indian descent to play Test Cricket for South Africa.
    * Gulam Bodi - represented South Africa's Cricket team in the ICC World T20

Women under apartheid
Colonialism and apartheid had a major impact on women since they suffered both racial and gender discrimination. Oppression against African women was different from discrimination against men. Indeed, they had very few or no legal rights, no access to education and no right to own property. Jobs were often hard to find but many African women worked as agricultural or domestic workers though wages were extremely low if not non-existent. Children suffered from diseases caused by malnutrition and sanitary problems, and mortality rates were therefore high. The controlled movement of African workers within the country through the Natives Urban Areas Act of 1923 and the pass-laws, separated family members from one another as men usually worked in urban centers, while women were forced to stay in rural areas. Marriage law and births were also controlled by the government and the pro-apartheid Dutch Reformed Church, who tried to restrict African birth rates.

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