A freelance arts writer since 1998, I fell in love with the theatre as a toddler, proved rubbish as a ballerina: my starring role was as Mrs Pussy in Noddy as a seven-year-old, and earned my stripes as an academic in Fine Arts and Art History, in subsequent years. I write for a range of online and print publications, including the Sunday Times, the Mail & Guardian and artslink.co.za and was formerly the arts editor of the SA Jewish Report, a weekly newspaper with which I was associated for 16 years. This blog promises you new stories every week, be they reviews, profiles, news stories or features.
Sometimes it takes a relatively small conflagration to set the whole world on fire and let it burn to the ground. Alexander Nanau’s brilliant documentary Collective tells a story that will trigger your sense of urgency as it will trouble your gut. It features on this year’s Encounters […]
DESCRIBING HERSELF AS a “full on earthquake”, veteran stage, film and television performer Shaleen Surtie-Richards loved people, but she quipped that there were some people she would have been happy to poke in the eye. Unequivocal in her values, she was unforgettable in her stage presence, whether it […]
SHE SQUINTS HER beautiful eyes and frowns gloriously. Her tan body is health and lithe, playful, watchful, vulnerable, tough. This is Zeytin, a mixed breed large dog in Istanbul, central to an extraordinary piece of filmography called Stray, made by Elizabeth Lo, which features on this year’s Encounters […]
BEHIND THE FEISTY face and wry sense of humour of 98-year-old Capetonian Ella Blumenthal is a history that underpins the life of many European Jews who lived through the scourge of the Holocaust, bereft, broken and with scant wherewithal to pick up pieces and start life all over […]
WHEN THE TRADITIONAL lines of documentary are allowed to blend into the messy whimsy of what fictional tales are about, real magic happens. A kind of universal sacred magic that speaks to what all of us are, as human beings. This is what you can anticipate in Maite […]
EVERY ONCE IN a while, you may be lucky enough to come across a piece of documentary work which is so direct and simple, so clear and deep that it takes your breath away from its opening frame to its credits, and you emerge with something new in […]
EPISODE TWO OF Martyn Le Roux’s Die Soutwaterheks positions the murky unknown in place. Recorded and released independently online, in both MP3 and MP4 formats, in Afrikaans with bits of English, it is accessible through various links, and breaks moulds of what storytelling can be in several ways. […]
PICTURE THE SCENARIO: It’s the time of the American Civil War. An exclusive coterie of Southern virginal young women live together in an isolated house on the brink of a wood. One day one of them discovers a wounded soldier among the mushrooms. Garbed in blue, he’s of […]
JUST WHEN YOU may think you in your society are ‘normal’ and above criticism (and better than the previous generation), along comes a work of such great wit and wisdom, tragic nuance and poetry that your values will shift. Even a tad. In three distinct acts, Die Laaste […]
CONJURING UP A whole bunch of clichés regarding fishes and sustainability, Like Water is for Fish promises an insight into storytelling and the magic it tosses into our midst, yet it feels in so many respects like a tick-box exercise on a bucket list. Garth Japhet, the co-founder […]
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