Elaine Proctor

Elaine Proctor

South African film director Elaine Proctor is a woman of many achievements; as a teenager she was active in the anti-Apartheid movement, documenting black resistance on film up until 1986 when the political situation made it impossible to continue. Much of her film work has reflected her passion for human rights and condemnation of racial prejudice, and in 1993 her film Friends, a story which follows the unlikely friendship of three very different women during South Africa’s apartheid, won the Cannes Film Festival Mention Spéciale - Caméra d'Or. Proctor now sits on the chapter for screenwriting at the BAFTA.

Although Rhumba is Proctor’s first book, its subject matter is no less hard-hitting than her films. When his mother doesn’t arrive in London, having taken the dangerous journey to escape her homeland, the war-torn Congo, ten year old Flambeau is cast out from his aunt’s squalid flat and left to fend for himself. In a desperate search to find his mother he meets a couple who take him under their wing – could their ties to the gangsters and human traffickers who took his mother, be the lead he was searching for?