Call Me Thief is the debut feature by South African director Daryne Joshua. The screenplay is based on the true story of John W. Fredericks, a former criminal who became a screenwriter. The main character of the film uses storytelling as a way to escape the misery of his life. In many ways, storytelling saves his life. This absolutely resonates with the personal circumstances of director Joshua who was able to escape from the Cape Flats, a very dangerous district of Cape Town in South Africa which was severely crime and poverty infested place. When you watch the film it feels like the director not only knows very well the place and the people that populate his story, but that the story itself is not necessarily someone else’s but his own.In his own words the director’s long path to  filmmaking started when he was 9 years old: “I sold comic books that I had written and drawn myself so I could go to the cinema, but financial constraints meant that my artistic career took a back seat and it took a minor miracle for me to finally earn a scholarship and gain entrance to film school”.

The film has received high acclaim in South Africa, where it had three-month release in theatres and is now  gaining an international attention. The film offers not only a rare glance into the bleak world of poor South Africans in the 1960s, but also moves the spectator and makes her/him to feel for the people who were born to suffer.