A hard-hitting spotlight on child-trafficking
DONOVAN Marsh has done it again. Famed for his gritty storytelling, the director delivers another captivating feature with Netflix’s I Am All Girls.
Marsh is no stranger to masterfully exploring the criminal underbelly of South Africa. He has shown his Midas touch with the Safta award-winning feature Dollar$ + White Pipes in 2005.
This time, he unpacks a global problem – human trafficking – via his two female leads: Jodie Snyman (Erica Wessels) and Ntombizonke Bapai (Hlubi Mboya). Both work for a special crimes unit tasked with looking into the perpetrators of this trafficking operation.
The unit is run by Captain George Mululeki (Mothusi Magano), who is facing a lot of pressure to close cases.
I Am All Girls opens with a vehicle transporting several young girls along a dusty road to Brakpan, east of Johannesburg.
The year is 1994 and a couple drops them off at a farm.
Not long after, the male culprit is caught and interrogated. He confesses: “They are gone, not just the five or six that you know off, more than 40.”
He adds: “My girlfriend and I, we kidnapped them. It wasn’t for us. We were acting under instructions from a National Party minister.”
When pushed for a name, he refuses to answer.
During the interrogation, the man confirms that the girls were smuggled to the Middle East. But not all of them. Some were used and then killed.
Shift to the present day, and Jodie –who has a penchant for not following rules and, in so doing, compromises cases – is tasked with looking into the murder of an elderly man.
While working the case, she maintains a beady eye on another involving child trafficking and a new lead takes her and her colleague, Samuel Arendse (Brendan Daniels) to Durban, where they uncover a major smuggling operation run by Salim Khan (played by the late Afzal Khan) and his brother Pharwaz Khan (Kaseran Pillay).
I Am All Girls follows the link between the smuggling operation and the recent string of murders.
At first, there’s a growing suspicion of a mole in the unit. But the truth is far darker, unsettling and hard-hitting – one of their own is seeking justice, vigilante style.
Marsh has adopted a multilayered approach
