Spring has sprung, and September brings a clutch of annual South African arts events. FNB Art Joburg, the continent’s longest-running art fair, takes place at the Sandton Convention Centre this weekend, while in Cape Town the Homecoming Centre in District Six hosts the much-loved Open Book Festival.The Cape Town Photography Festival is already under way and will continue for most of the month. The Jomba! Contemporary Dance Experience has likewise been on the go in Durban and will extend into a special season at the Market Theatre in Joburg next week.Then there’s the European Film Festival, with screenings in Joburg, Pretoria, Cape Town and Durban (September 17-27). This year’s programme comprises a dozen films representing as many countries, though in the best tradition of pan-Europeanism — and following the now-standard film financing model of coproduction — each of them is a transnational undertaking in one way or another.Take, for example, Aquí, a Spanish-language film with a Portuguese director (Tiago Guedes) and a Franco-Portuguese producer (Paulo Branco), shot in Portugal and Spain. It has South African connections too: Aquí is a cinematic rendering of JM Coetzee’s enigmatic trio of novels, The Childhood of Jesus (2013), The Schooldays of Jesus (2016) and The Death of Jesus (2019).Is Coetzee South African? Well, yes, but he has also been an Australian citizen for decades. He previously left apartheid South Africa for lengthy stints in the US and UK. His literary influences introduce other “national” affinities, from the Irishman Samuel Beckett to the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges, the Russian Fyodor Dostoevsky and the German-Czech Franz Kafka (whose tortured life and times are the subject of another European Film Festival piece, Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s Franz). Writers are, after all, citizens of the world.We have been thrown by fate into existence, into a game whose rules we did not choose. Perhaps we are refugees from a former life. Perhaps we are condemned to an infinite series of afterlives, each time forgetting where we came from and who we once were.The Jesus novels are set in a fictional Spanish-speaking country, somewhere between utopia and dystopia. It receives innumerable migrants from elsewhere, giving them a new identity, relative material comfort and safety. Two such arrivals are a boy, David, and a middle-aged man, Simón, who takes on a fatherly role. Together, they navigate this strange land, joined by a woman, Inés, who both is and is not David’s mother.The trilogy, marking a return of sorts to the allegorical style of Coetzee’s earlier works Waiting for the Barbarians and Life & Times of Michael K, has frequently been described as “Kafkaesque”. The characters, drifting and distant, seek to escape from or craft some freedom within baffling systems and indifferent institutions. In the Jesus novels these are more in the vein of mysterious bureaucracies than brutal states, but they still have a dehumanising effect.Some critics, frustrated by Coetzee’s “dreamlike mode of nowhere and no-when”, have complained that the vagueness of the setting and the opacity of the characters result in “an allegory that is endlessly referred to, that never hits home, having no real-world corollary”. While “Aquí” means “here”, and the film version provides a coherent visual sense of place — throughout its three-and-a-half unhurried, pensive hours, it dwells on stark but cinematically gorgeous locations, from brutalist architecture to sparse landscapes — it does not “locate” the story, nor does it seek to elucidate Coetzee’s elusive meaning.David, Simón and Inés make up a holy family of sorts. Their experiences and even some of the words they speak echo those of the biblical Jesus, Joseph and Mary. David is a special child, though his significance is arguably projected onto him by others rather than self-evident. And like his adoptive parents, like all of us, he has no clear answers to the big philosophical questions: Who am I? Why am I here? How did I get here? Where am I going?We have been thrown by fate into existence, into a game whose rules we did not choose. Perhaps we are refugees from a former life. Perhaps we are condemned to an infinite series of afterlives, each time forgetting where we came from and who we once were.Such a possibility lends additional poignance to the screening of Aquí at this time, merely weeks after the death of veteran Spanish actor Manolo Solo (who is Simón in the film). He has followed his final character to the undiscovered country from which no traveller returns.Business Day