The Wound

Many are the traumas of coming-of-age, but none can be compared to ukwaluka – the Ritual of Circumcision followed by the teenagers of the Xhosa tribe in South Africa, who wait for the physical and emotional wound to heal on its own. Xolani is a worker who is asked to initiate a group of boys into manhood, somewhere on the mountains over the Cape of Good Hope. This is where he will remember a facet of his sexual identity he has buried in the past. Combining an anthropologist’s eye for detail with the tenderness of a conspirator of pleasure, the director talks about the painful game of constructing masculinity, while he brings down exotic stereotypes.