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 […]
IT TAKES A special blend of creative fierceness, respect for the original and gentleness toward traditions established by a theatre over many years, to reinvent a great old chestnut with enormous success. The creative team behind this year’s iteration of Charlotte’s Web are not names previously associated with […]
IF YOU REMEMBER the 1980 Jamie Uys film The Gods Must be Crazy or were taught a very simplistic understanding of San rock art in the grade 9 art syllabus, you will have a vague and superficial ability to recognise the complicated magic of Paul Weinberg’s voyages of […]
THE ROOM IS deeply silent, but robustly populated. All eyes are focused on the speaker, who is out of your line of sight. In this 1989 photograph of a trade union meeting at the University of Cape Town, photographer Omar Badsha (b. 1945) peers with a clean mix […]
HOW DO YOU respond to a person you love deeply – have loved deeply for many years – when you know they are slipping away from you? This is the central underlying thread in The Ward, a book of photographs by Gideon Mendel published in Britain by Trolley […]
EVERY GREAT POLITICAL yarn has an underbelly and a back story that you will not really be able to find in all its grubby details in the historical or official literature or records. It’s about the back-stabbing insecurities that comes of a system not always fully trusting itself. […]
A SKOP, SKIET en donder novel with a conservation twist, Tony Park’s freshly published Scent of Fear is a real page turner. But it takes a special kind of skill to write in the first person, as a dog. Convincingly. And Australian journalist-turned-novelist Park achieves all of this and […]
HE’S FIFTEEN YEARS old and higher maths is a doddle for him. Toilet protocol and social behaviour, not so much. Meet Christopher Boone (Kai Brummer), who has Asperger’s Syndrome. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is an astute and carefully focused, hyper-detailed but extremely watchable […]
PREMISED IN THE kind of sing-song voice that you might attribute to the retelling of a bible story, The Season of Glass is a fictional vessel for messianic prophecy, focusing on the birth of twins. But it’s not that simple. As you plunge into this complicated tale of […]
SOMETIMES IT IS not the story of a film that grabs you by the scruff of your neck and doesn’t let go. It’s something else. It’s a thing that takes the collaborative energies that make an entity as complex as a film come together, and opens a rich […]
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