Please note: Some production notes may contain spoilers.

The plight of the poor and unhoused is a starkly present and concrete problem throughout the world today, but for Michael James, writer and director of God’s Work, attempting to portray that plight calls for storytelling that transcends the conventional narrative of social realism.

“My intent with God’s Work is to engage with both the internal and external worlds of the characters,” says James, “and to allow the audience deeper access into the surreal and often troubling recesses of the human mind.” A compelling group portrait of street survivors in Durban, South Africa, and an audacious exploration of film style, God’s Work is a thoughtful inquiry into what it means to be human in an unjust world.

As a narrative feature film, God’s Work grew out of James’ experimentation with documentary form and its limits. “Pre-COVID I had experimented with stories about people on the margins of society, mostly from a documentary perspective,” explains James, whose background in philosophy and theatre inform his approach to cinema.

“My goal was to move an audience not just to empathize, but to feel really disturbed and disrupted in their own lives. Then during the COVID lockdown, the Durban government set up camps for homeless people, and I was invited to do some photography and filming there. In one of those camps, a group of guys introduced themselves to me as filmmakers, and it sparked an interesting and beautiful relationship. I started going there every week. That is how I spent the lockdown, doing scriptwriting workshops.

“Through these workshops I saw how homeless people were fictionalizing much of their life stories, and how that enriched them, how their fictionalized stories conveyed more truth in a way than the straight facts. My own presence there was even a fiction; I was trying to figure out how, as a middle-class young White man, I fit in this space where I had not had this kind of life experience. I tried several different documentary approaches, but they never really felt like they were getting at the truth of what I saw and felt.”

Two powerful films that James saw at the time inspired the melding of cinematic genres that he eventually brought to God’s Work: La Haine, Matthieu Kassovitz’s searing 1995 drama of violence and oppression in a working-class suburb of Paris; and, on a very different plane of perception, Encounters at the End of the World, Werner Herzog’s 2007 documentary about Antarctica and the eccentric scientists and characters who staff an isolated research station there.

As James recalls, “There is this outlandish moment in the film where Herzog is narrating it as if aliens are arriving at the end of history. I know from his work that he fictionalizes truth to get to a deeper truth, so it sparked the idea: I’m going to take some of these ideas that have been inside of me, take the drama of La Haine, and the craziness of Herzog, and I think I wrote the first drafts of the script in three or four sleepless nights, and that launched a fiction story from there.”

In the documentary filmmaking-within-the-film that we witness in God’s Work, the documentarian—played by Michael James him self—alienates his subjects by bringing the unwelcome presence of a government representative into their sanctuary.

The abrupt falling-out that follows underlines the tension James sought to illuminate between the city’s destitute population, largely Black, and the comfortable White world that may be well-intentioned but lacks understanding. In real life, however, “We never had that conflict; my relationship is still to this day incredibly beautiful with those guys. In the film I wanted to try to be as critical of my presence there as possible, and still be a bit humorous, because if you are going to laugh at someone, laugh at yourself.”

The decision to create a scripted fiction film using professional actors allowed James to pursue a certain playfulness with cinematic form, to open his story to different layers of perception for both the characters and the audience. Using varying lenses, lighting schemes, and aspect ratios, he submerses us in different levels of reality. Regular chronological narrative flow unfolds slowly with long static takes and naturalistic darkness and light. We can feel the banality and absurdity of hours passing aimlessly. But when we are in Simphiwe’s chaotic, surreal inner world (the haunted main protagonist), past, present, and future are interchangeable, as are fantasy and reality. Constant camera movement, a narrow, constricting aspect ratio, and hallucinatory lighting and sound plunge us into Simphiwe’s anguish. A third format—documentary-style handheld camera, zoom moves, raw cuts—are visual cues about cinema verité, but also reveal its inadequacy, demonstrated by the failed efforts of the documentary filmmaker to capture his subjects in depth.

There is a fourth level that James calls “the archival world” of memory, enacted by the clip of one of cinema’s founding artifacts: the Lumière Brothers’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat from 1896. As the light and sound of a train washes over Simphiwe’s sleeping form at the beginning and end of the film, it is as if film history itself is washing over this exploration of human suffering. An old DV cam with a blocky screen frame records Simphiwe’s confessional retrospections, the throwback technology signalling memory.

Viewers can spot other sly genre citations as well, from an orchestrated singing number hinting at musical comedy, to a Waiting for Godot homage as the men find themselves stranded by a lone tree in the countryside. (“I’m obsessed with Godot” confesses James.)

Despite these various genre and technical treatments, the viewer is caught up in the storytelling as a cohesive whole. “We tell ourselves stories every day to just get out of bed,” muses James, “or, in the characters’ cases, to just get up and move, to not overdose on drugs, to not succumb to trauma and despair. In Simphiwe’s case, he finds the stories that keep him going in dreams and memories and in his interior life.”

Sleeping, waking, and dreaming are pervasive themes throughout God’s Work. “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep!” is the rallying cry of the zealous young activist who tries to rouse the homeless men to resistance. But they are afraid to fall asleep—afraid that they might join the victims of “resignation sickness” who pile up, comatose, along the squat-house hallways. “Resignation sickness is actually a real documented syndrome that has been observed in migrant groups,” explains James. “People on the margins of society eventually reach a point where the future is so un-determinable, you realize that no matter what plans you have there is no way to escape the despair for which you are heading. You fall into a coma, and some people die.

The actual syndrome has not been found in Durban, so I am not using it as a concrete plot device; it is more a symbol of the psychosis of trauma manifested physically.” At the end of God’s Work, the exhausted, demoralized friends fall headlong into deep sleep, perhaps succumbing to the sleeping sickness. But, as we have learned earlier in the film, victims of this sickness do not dream, and our protagonists are all dreaming of the Lumière Brothers’ train—still immersed in storytelling.

Postscript, we are shown the cast and crew of God’s Work behind the scenes: they are actors taking a break on a location, surrounded by cameras, cables, and lights. Inspired by Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry, James explains why he chose to leave the viewer with this unfiltered documentary view:

“For all the tough questions about homelessness and despair, there are not any easy answers. And so, the only answer I have is to pull back and say it is not real, it is a film. That gives us more space to stop and think about it, as opposed to an ending that shuts a heavy door and leaves us wondering, are the characters dead or asleep? Instead, it becomes more a poetic dialogue with oneself at the end.

Back when we humans were just living through our winters in caves, with light flickering on the cave walls, we spun illusions and dreams and fantasies into story. That is one of the reasons we have survived so long, because we have been able to make up stories that are not real but are more real than the stories that are real.