When a filmmaker of Imran Hamdulay’s ability completes a debut feature, the question the industry asks is always the same: what next, and how soon? The Heart Is a Muscle — the Cape Flats drama that won the Berlinale Ecumenical Jury Prize, represented South Africa at the 2026 Academy Awards in the International Feature category, and has been in continuous theatrical and streaming distribution since its March 2026 South African release — answered the question of what Hamdulay could do with his first film. The answer, confirmed this week by Sowetan Live’s Cannes coverage, is that the second film is already in pre-production.
Pieces is set on the Cape Flats and filmed in English and Afrikaans. It follows Salma and her two sons after the loss of their father as they navigate grief, adolescence, and belonging. The project has secured R6 million in funding from the National Film and Video Foundation’s micro-budget slate, with filming due to begin in September 2026. The film is in pre-production through Diepeveen, the South African production company — the same producing infrastructure that backed The Heart Is a Muscle.
What the Second Film Is For
The Hamdulay who made The Heart Is a Muscle was working through his own inherited history — a film about generational trauma and the specific cost of forgiveness in a community shaped by apartheid’s spatial violence. It was personal in the specific way that debut features often are: the filmmaker discovering the formal language they need by making the film that most urgently required making.
Pieces moves from that inheritance to something different in its emotional register. Where The Heart Is a Muscle was about what is passed between fathers and sons — violence, responsibility, the weight of a history you did not choose — Pieces is about what is left when the father is gone. Grief, adolescence, and belonging on the Cape Flats: the same landscape, a different wound. The choice to return to the Cape Flats immediately suggests a filmmaker who is not treating his debut’s setting as a location but as a subject — a place that contains more than one story, more than one kind of loss, more than one answer to the question of what it means to grow up in the specific conditions that apartheid created and that post-apartheid policy has incompletely addressed.
The NFVF Micro-Budget Slate
The National Film and Video Foundation’s micro-budget slate is South Africa’s primary institutional mechanism for supporting debut and early-career filmmakers. R6 million is a modest budget — significantly less than the kind of production scale that international co-production enables — but it is the appropriate scale for a film that, by its subject matter and formal ambition, belongs in the tradition of intimate, location-specific South African drama that the NFVF micro-budget slate was designed to support.
The NFVF’s decision to back Hamdulay’s second film with a micro-budget slate commitment before the international recognition of The Heart Is a Muscle had fully settled says something about the NFVF’s capacity to identify South African filmmaking talent early. Or it says that the Berlinale prize and the Oscar submission accelerated a conversation that was already underway. Either way, the commitment is the signal: South Africa’s national film body is invested in what Hamdulay does next.
Filming begins September 2026. RollCallAfrica will be on set.
Pieces (in development) · Dir./Writer: Imran Hamdulay · South Africa · Cape Flats · English/Afrikaans · Production: Diepeveen · Funded by: NFVF micro-budget slate (R6 million) · Filming: September 2026.
— Lerato Dlamini. RollCallAfrica, Johannesburg. 17 May 2026.
Sources: Sowetan Live (17 May 2026 — “South Africa takes centre stage at Cannes”), National Film and Video Foundation official communications, NFVF micro-budget slate programme documentation.
