- 30 Oct – 01 Nov 2026
- The Rockefeller Hotel, CPT
Peter Smuts is a Cape Town-based filmmaker, writer and director with over 15 years of experience across the South African film industry. He began his formal training at AFDA at the age of 17, graduating in 2011 with a BA in Motion Picture Medium.
His career has spanned a wide range of technical departments and productions, from major international features including Mad Max: Fury Road and Avengers: Age of Ultron to independent, micro-budget films.
In 2016, Smuts began channelling that experience into writing, directing and producing his own films. His debut short, Under the Rainbow, won Best Short Film at the 2020 South African Independent Film Festival, while his second, Delight, was a finalist at the 2021 Los Angeles Film Awards.
His third short film, Color of Dreams serves as a proof of concept for a feature film screenplay he has written, marking the next step in his journey as a writer-director.
What was the starting point for this film, and what made you want to tell this particular story?
I’ve noticed that whenever I’m going through an emotionally charged period — a break-up, grief or any time when there’s a mix of complicated thoughts and emotions to process — I have extremely vivid dreams. Like most dreams, they don’t always make sense, but somehow they express what I’m feeling in a way my literal mind cannot. That’s what I wanted to explore with the film: the unconscious processing of complicated feelings between two people at a turning point in their lives.
What did the short-film format allow you to do creatively that a longer format might not have?
The short-film format allowed us to explore a concentrated moment between two people, focusing on that moment rather than the specific circumstances that brought them there. I think that also allowed us to be more poetic, because the film becomes more about the nature of the experience than one specific instance of it.
Is there a particular moment, character or idea in the film that holds special significance for you as the director?
My favourite moment is an extremely subtle performance moment that people might not even notice. Early in the film, Jess and Cal are sitting on a bench, reconciling after a tense evening. Their hands touch and lightly intertwine, almost out of habit, and you see the moment that familiarity becomes discomfort because the intimacy between them is no longer there. I love it because it wasn’t scripted or directed. It was simply this beautiful, subtle moment between the performers, Ydalie Turk and Daniel Richards.
What conversation do you hope the film creates with audiences after they leave the cinema?
I’d like people to leave the cinema thinking about someone they once loved and, regardless of what their relationship with that person is now, take a moment to value the time they shared.
Where does this film sit within your wider creative journey, and what are you interested in exploring next as a filmmaker?
This was the first time I explored surrealism and magical realism in a film, and it’s something I really enjoyed and want to continue exploring, both in the feature-film version of this short and in other projects I’m developing with my producer, David Franciscus. There’s something about creating visuals that express abstract, emotionally complicated thoughts in a non-literal way that really scratches an itch for me.
