DO YOU REMEMBER a time when the world was a different place culturally, and the careful curation of an exhibition could be allowed the time and energy of nine whole years in its inception? The Cézanne exhibition central to this Exhibitions on Screen documentary ticks all those glorious […]
WHAT POWER DOES a government have in whitewashing filthy sins of the past? When Lithuanian officer Jonas Noreika was killed in 1947 by the KGB, he was revered as a martyr for his country, and the celebrations of his life ran so thick with enthusiasm, that his crimes […]
GLOWING, YET UNDERSTATED magic comes of a particular kind of candid, descriptive writing that doesn’t stoop to sensationalism or bald self-promotion. You can find this in George Orwell’s domestic diaries, but you can also find it in Adam Riley’s Birds of South Africa. This current publication offers an […]
It was any woman’s absolute worst nightmare. And it was a story that rocked South Africa to its core. In April of 1997, Celeste Nurse gave birth to her first baby at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town. A beautiful little girl. Amidst the blur of giving birth […]
LISTEN TO THE first few lyrics of Sodade, a song written in the 1950s which was popularised and rose to meteoric cultural proportions in the early 1990s, and you will know exactly who Cesária Évora was – or at least, you will know her voice, which runs like […]
PICTURE THE SCENARIO. A performance of Gustav Mahler’s first symphony, the Titan, composed in 1888, is about to begin. The bassoonists stand poised, the trumpets in the wings. All due time hewn established pomp and ceremony is de rigueur; performers are in black. The audience is quiet, in […]
CONTEMPORARY RUSSIA. A land under the thumb of a relentless dictator. A land, seemingly on a crash course that might take the whole world with it. But what if you had the opportunity to shift that crash course? What if that opportunity came with the ultimate price tag? […]
YOU MAY HAVE your opinion about how other people lead their lives or live within the confines of their bodies, but have you ever really considered taking the proverbial ‘stepping into someone’s shoes’ all the way? Stripping its narrative of sweet or sweeping platitudes, Jerry Rothwell’s film The […]
WHICHEVER WAY YOU look at it, the little sliver of land at the heart of the Middle East is a hot potato. Enough to get otherwise intelligent and rational people spouting vicious invectives at strangers who have different opinions about it. Or its right to exist. That’s Israel […]
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 […]
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