ACTS OF MAN

DRAMA SERIES | IN DEVELOPMENT

Called to investigate a brutal killing in the remote town of Hale, two city detectives face a shaken community convinced the devil is at work.  

Forced to partner with a reclusive, disgraced former SAPS occult investigator, the deeper they find themselves entangled in a town torn down social and religious lines, the more they’re drawn into secondary cases, especially to a young girl suffering violent abuse at home.  But is all as it seems? An air of creeping supernatural dread hangs over Hale, and as the case races towards conclusion, shocking revelations will force both investigators and townsfolk to confront their own demons and give chilling answer to the question:

Which of these horrors are the work of the devil and which are the Acts of Man?

A police procedural that transcends into a deeper exploration of a country’s fractured psyche, where a ritualistic murder in a small town takes us into the heart of South Africa’s unresolved past., stirring unspoken conflicts that draw on real life testimonies of the SAPC Occult Unit operating in the death throes of Apartheid. ACTS OF MAN is a crime-drama come supernatural thriller drawing inspiration from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, from the Nordic Noir genre, from series like True Detective, The Fall, Top of the Lake and from seminal African works such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, 

Everyone is afraid of the devil but no one can agree on who or what the devil is. Do our ideas of the devil stem from our fear of the unknown, our felt mistrust of one another or the darker repressed spaces in ourselves? We unravel these questions of faith and superstition laying bare the extent to which religious ideas are a mask and the extent to which they speak to invisible truths. 

IN DEVELOPMENT BY BE PHAT MOTEL, ATMAN MEDIA LAB, XYZ FILMS

CREATED BY SEAN DRUMMOND & SHEETAL MAGAN

THE MOST DANGEROUS DEVILS ARE OUR OWN