THE TRUTH IS a strange thing in the film industry. All too often the disclaimer that a piece is ‘based on the unbelievable but true story’ is used in the marketing junket. Does it really matter? Does it work? Do people flock more to see a film that […]
SACREDNESS IN AN object comes in many iterations, many of which can be completely unexpected. When you visit Charmaine Haines’s exhibition at the Kim Sacks Gallery, you will be accosted with a sense of the sacred that is joyful and full of levity, bold and clear, but unequivocally […]
IT IS THE 1960s, the time of the border war that saw the South African Police head to head with cadres of SWAPO, in what is today Namibia. Simon (Dawid Minnaar) and his wife Mia (Gretha Brazelle) are fugitives on the road to safer, less war-torn pastures in […]
HOLIDAY TIME BECKONS and a young white South African family comprising two little girls, a teenaged son and their parents are readying themselves for their annual seaside vacation. Bessie (Simonè Benjamin) is but 19. She’s brown. And she’s employed as the family’s nanny. And she’s never seen the […]
THE PLIGHT OF melanin-deficient people came under the medical marketing spotlight in South Africa through the month of September, which made the brief staging of Arthur Molepo’s contemplation on albinism Mama, I want the black that you are, particularly prescient. It’s a complicated work told with a hand […]
VERY RARELY DO you get a coming together of narrative values that are not only sensitive to the text that they honour, but also have the maturity and sense of purpose to create a filmic product that stands on its own creative feet. This is what happens in […]
SAY THE WORD ‘tokoloshe’ and you will have people quivering in their boots for generations. But relieve that scary sprite of his evil associations and you open a rich vein of narrative possibilities that teases open everything from fake news to bullying, fah-fee rhetoric to face time with […]
IT WAS ALWAYS the love affair to end all love affairs and give birth to a myriad of platitudes and clichés about the universal tale of boy meeting girl, in spite of social barriers, and boy loving girl in the midst of catastrophe. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has […]
REPLETE WITH ITS jazz dives, camaraderie and poetry, its dinginess, brothels and gangs Sophiatown aka Kofifi was a suburb in Johannesburg that was an apartheid loophole until 1955. It was the one place in which black people could live in relative harmony with people of all colours, free […]
PICTURE THE FAMOUS bit of Western classical musical composed in 1928 by Maurice Ravel and called Boléro translated into raw sobs. Picture a professional mourner at a cemetery and a cast of close to 40 in costumes magicked to life by Black Coffee. Picture it all against a […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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