EXCLUSIVE: Above you can watch the trailer for African streamer Showmax’s latest true-crime doc, Original Sin: My Son the Killer.
The feature doc follows Thea Pretorius, mother of Gerhard Jansen van Vuuren, who murdered his 25-year-old girlfriend Andrea Venter in front of her neighbours, security guards and CCTV cameras in 2011 and then escaped two years later just before his trial, going on to avoid capture for seven years. It will launch on Showmax on March 22.
Van Vuuren assumed three different identities in South Africa and Brazil over seven years to escape the authorities and started families with multiple women, becoming a father in the process. After helping him escape, his mother was forced to come to terms with her son being a killer.
As she admits in the trailer, “He’s capable of worse things… he’s a killer.”
We first told you about the doc in May 2022, just months before van Vuuren was sentenced to life for Venter’s murder. At the time, it was known simply as Original Sin and planned as a miniseries with the option to be crafted into a feature film.
The doc comes is a co-production between Showmax, which kickstarted the current true-crime wave in South Africa with the SAFTA-winning Devilsdorp; UK producers Rogan Productions and Electric Shadow Company in association with Brazil’s Red Earth and South Africa’s Combined Artists. Abacus Media Rights has boarded for international distribution.
John Gutierrez, whose debut feature Sons of the Sea was named Best South African Film at the Durban International Film Festival, is directing. The doc will follow the cat-and-mouse police hunt across two continents, interwoven with CCTV footage of Venter’s murder, video from van Vuuren’s criminal trials and interviews with both families, the Brazilian Federal Police, Rio de Janeiro Interpol, the South African police and legal teams on the case.
“Every 63 seconds a woman becomes a victim of gender-based violence in South Africa,” he said. “Before Andrea was murdered, she was hunted by Gerhard. She did everything that could be expected of her, including filing a restraining order and moving cities, but it wasn’t enough.”
On the production front, Rogan is known for docs such as Steve McQueen’s BAFTA winner Uprising and Putin: A Russian Spy Story, while Electric Shadow, which provided financing, counts BAFTA nominee McQueen on its credits sheet. Red Earth made Brazilian crime series Narcoworld: Dope Stories and Combined Artists is the South African producer behind investigative journalism show Carte Blanche and the SAFTA-nominated true-crime series Strangers You Know.
Producers are Sarah Laita and Jay Taylor from Electric Shadow Company and Mark Hedgecoe and James Rogan from Rogan Productions, with Jana Marx (Devilsdorp) as editorial producer.
“As a South African now living in London, this story is close to my heart,” said Laita. “I was back in South Africa in 2020 during one of the lockdowns when I first heard about this story and was captivated by it. Beyond all its twists and turns, it’s a deeply moving family drama that shows how gender-based violence and femicide continue to be a deep problem not only in South Africa but around the world.”