Actress, author, and filmmaker Ayanda Borotho (40) recently announced a South African horror film titled Every Day Is Halloween For Women.
Ayanda at the time said the film was hard to portray as it told a real story of abuse.
“I play the lead in a thrilling film that I got to be a part of, it’s horror so I hope you’re ready. If you think you’ve seen horror and scary movies, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Of course, it was a little bit hard at first when I heard about it. For every horror that I have watched I literally scream through it so how do you expect me to be in the movie when I battle to watch the movies? But when the director sat me down and told me about the vision and what they were actually trying to do with this, there was no way I could have said no. Absolutely no way,” she says in the Instagram video.
This week, DStv BoxOffice reveals that there was never a horror film but a campaign to try and end the scourge that is gender-based violence in South Africa.
According to the South African Police Services Annual Crime Statistics Presentation (April 2019 – March 2020), there are approximately 2 695 women horrendously murdered in a year, and every three hours a woman is killed.
Femicide is five times higher than the global average, according to the World Health Organisation (2016). These deplorable statistics are highlighted in DStv BoxOffice’s GBV-focused campaign titled Every Day Is Halloween For Women.
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The campaign uses the horror of Halloween as a real-life reference and metaphor. It starts with the audience being invited to watch a locally produced alleged horror movie - Every Day Is Halloween on BoxOffice.
However, instead of finding a horror film, the audience is confronted with the harrowing statistics that tally the brutal killings of South African women, concluding with the campaign message that every day is Halloween for women.
Executive Head: Marketing at MultiChoice Thabisa Mkhwanazi says horror movies are based on fictional stories but in South Africa violence is real.
“In South Africa, the violence perpetrated against women is sadly not fictional,” she says.
“This campaign relays that the danger, fear, and violence that is synonymous with the horror movie genre, is experienced every day by women in our country,” she says.
Starring actress, author, and women’s rights activist Ayanda Borotho as the lead in the horror “movie” and the face of the campaign, the trailer was directed by AK from production company Spitfire TV.
“Our country is filled with horror stories of women being killed every day. This violence is experienced both in public and private spaces. The character I portray is barricaded in her home, looking out of a window with a sense of danger lurking just outside her door,” Ayanda stresses.
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In a statement released by DStv BoxOffice about the campaign, it reads, “The sense of danger becomes real when the woman and her young daughter are attacked in their lounge. Later, the lead character Borotho and her daughter are seen being pursued by a perpetrator as she drives away swerving uncontrollably while looking over her shoulder in the hopes of getting away. With no help or refuge, in the final scene, the child, left alone at the side of the road calls out to her mother with no response, all that is left is the deafening life-ending silence that is a reality for so many women in South Africa.”
Ayanda says, “Women cannot escape the violence they face in this country daily, no matter how hard they try. We are trapped in our homes with abusers and killers known to us and the community. Outside the home, we are harassed and hunted. We are separated from our children and families because we are running from physical and emotional danger.”
All proceeds made from the campaign will go to the Uyinene Mrwetyana Foundation (UMF) launched in honour of a 19-year-old university student who was brutally raped and murdered in 2019 at the Clareinch Post Office in Cape Town where she had gone to collect a parcel.
Watch the full trailer:
