‘tar’ is a 26-minute film that, by utilizing the archive and recently taken footage, reads into potholed roads as a reflection of a political past crossroading a precarious present within South Africa; memory becomes a site of nostalgic contention and re-construction. These asphalt veins that connect cities are generally regarded as a benchmark standard of judging efficient governance. This is viewed within the now and disregards past urban planning structures that were rooted within exclusionary Apartheid systems. 

This enquiry into the past is an attempt to understand how the future could pan out. In order to recognize our responsibility, our standing within tomorrows and the future to come, an in-depth, unfiltered look into the past needs to be confronted. How can we take this unearthing of trauma and reconciliation into a future that too often appears anxiety ridden and polarized? This film does not offer suggestions of sugar-coated Utopias; instead it points to one singular country's grapplings with a history untreated and turns the microcosmic into the macrocosmic by joining our collective need to pay attention to our Earth and the impending consequences of climate change, analyzing themes of past colonial infrastructures, nostalgia, personal memory and the Anthropocene.