‘Locals Only’ awarded Best Fiction Film at One Screen 2020.
‘Locals Only’ premiers at Toronto International Film Festival in September 2019.
“Infusing affective drama with dreamy youthful energy, Brent Harris crafts an uncommonly sharp explosion of innocence and complicity.” - TIFF
Toronto, Canada
September 5-15, 2019
Program
“I set the film in Cape Town in the 70’s, but I wanted the piece to have a timelessness. You could easily tell the same story today, here in America.”
“I made this film to remind myself what experiencing those emotions felt like, in the immediate, as I did back then. I wanted to locate the story just below conscious thought, simmering in the senses, just as a teenager would experience it.
It fills me with sorrow to think that an expression of pure joy could be a punishable offense, that an innocent act could have irreversible consequences, and change the trajectory of a life, but it could, it did, every day.
And it still does today. Not just in Apartheid South Africa, but right here in our own backyard.
I ask how far we’ve come, and what lessons we have learned?”
BRENT HARRIS, WRITER-DIRECTOR
