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. I am currently a Research Associate at Wits University. This blog promises you new stories every week, be they reviews, profiles, news stories or features.
HOW DO YOU tell your beautiful little six-year-old daughter that she faces a sheer cliff in terms of how the year ahead may look for her health? Little girls are supposed to be thinking about unicorns and mermaids, dragon slayers and princesses, not about whether their arms and […]
WHEN LIFE KICKS you hard in the proverbial teeth and you don’t know which way to turn, who do you become? This is an idea developed by Ruth Meehan, in The Bright Side. More than an essay on breast cancer, this is a sassy, sarky and oft sweet […]
RELATIONSHIPS ARE THE glue to life. And they’re the lubricant to most stories. The professional relationship between Aïssa (Déborah Lukumuena) and Georges (Gérard Depardieu) is central to Constance Meyer’s film Robust, which is widely punted as a tale of contrasts. It is available online and without cost, as […]
IF YOU WERE living your worst life and the sliver of an opportunity presented itself for you to change it for the better, a dangerous sliver, would you grab it? The romance of the tale of Simas Kudirka, the Lithuanian radioman at sea who saw an opportunity to […]
WHAT IF YOU knew that there was a special injunction among the dead that, like the living, they have nine months of a gestation period before they leave us forever? This is one of the premises of a curious Portuguese film entitled The Year of the Death of […]
WAR IS WELL-TRODDEN story-telling material. It’s about loyalties and politics, love and conflict. It’s about cruelty and kindness, territory and wealth. In short, it’s a microcosm of what makes society tick, ramped up to its most violent. Jasmila Zbanic’s film Quo Vadis, Aida? an extraordinary tale of a […]
WHEN YOU ARE finished being a teenager, you may look back on those years with a curious mix of nostalgia, gentleness and maybe condemnation. Your sixteen-year old self was you, but unformed, less confident, more unaware. More physically perfect, but less able to know that. In thinking all […]
WHEN YOU ARE confronted with the idea of losing your person, you will turn into a demon if you have to. You will break heaven and earth with the hope that these combats may twist the path of the stars. Even if you know that you are just […]
“IF YOU WERE born in Morocco, but only lived there for two years, why do you still consider it your homeland?” This and other myriad, somewhat intrusive and philosophically complex questions put to adolescents are central to Maria Speth’s immersive documentary, Mr Bachmann and his Class, which will […]
STAND BACK FROM Agnieszka Holland’s film Charlatan, loosely based on the life of herbalist Jan Mikolášek (1889-1973) and the grand impression that it leaves sits like lead on your chest. Not that this is a bad – or inaccurate – thing. This intense portrait of, in large part, […]
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