Jaco Bouwer studied and worked in theatre for many years and only recently moved into the medium of film. He has won multiple awards for his theatre productions and designs over the years. Apart from multiple series and films made for television, Gaia is his first feature film. One of his short films this country is lonely premiered at IFFR 2019.

In his theatre work, Bouwer has created work that resists convention and easy categorisation. He’s equally at home in theatre, dance, site-specific performance and installation art. It is, however, his unique ability to combine all these media to reflect the visual, spatial and acoustic dimensions of language that really sets his work apart. This aesthetic focus has been called everything from post-modern and experimental, to avant-garde, and even subversive – but in bringing this aesthetic to a wider audience, Bouwer also seeks to expose the artificial barriers that exist between and within cultures. His complex cultural critique favours controversial subjects, without any attempt to solve the social and political issues they raise. Instead, Bouwer prefers to take his stories to the next level, combining the personal and the political, aesthetics with introspective enquiry and a radical formalism with an equally radical expression of subjectivity to hurl them into the realm of the imagination.