Based on a Nadine Gordimer novel, this bold and offbeat work, Carlsen's debut film, was shot clandestinely in Johannesburg. The story concerns an attorney in a legal aid center, Anna, who is the renegade scion of pioneer Boers; Stephen, Anna's black friend for whom life in the banned resistance eats away at his sense of self even as it defines him; and Toby, a British publisher new to Johannesburg and its uniquely dangerous set of mores. Like much of Carlsen's work, this one incorporates jazz music, with a particularly South African bent, and a group of African be-bop singers. Carlsen has woven music into the rhythms of editing as well. Dilemma, with its black-white conundrum and its bluesy black-and-white cinematography (much of it on the street, in the shadows), reminds one of its American counterpart of the same era, John Cassavetes' Shadows. But Carlsen has adapted the polish of Gordimer's thinking to the roughness of the form in small, telling moments and comments: Apartheid captured in a glance.