A film by TESSA FLEISCHER

Based on a story PAULINE SMITH

THE SISTERS, set in the first decade of the last century in the Little Karroo, was written by Pauline Smith born in Oudtshoorn of an English father married to a Scotswoman. As a child she accompanied her father, the first M.D. to settle in the area, on his visits to patients on their isolated farms. It must have been on these drives that she gained the deep and lasting impressions of the veldt and its people.

Despite the subtle touches which set the film so charmingly in period and place, ‘The Sisters’ transcends time and place for it deals with almost classical simplicity and grandeur, with eternal human problems of guilt and remorse, of love and sorrow.

In my interpretation of Pauline Smith’s writing I have tried keep the deceptively simple feel of a biblical parable.




“..These short stories are all charged with a magnificent finality from which one may not hold the title of greatness. She understands the Afrikaner of the veldt . Not with the detachment of the intellect …but with the warm comprehension of the heart.”
Herman Charles Bosman

“The Little Karroo stories have the beauty and authority of insight that reaches beyond the historical view of life.
Nadine Gordimer

“…and I, perhaps the earliest wondering admirer of her strange, austere, tender and ruthless talent. The reader will decide for himself whether or not she has unusual originality, emotional power, sense of beauty, moral backbone.”
Arnold Bennett

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