“YOU ARE THE cause of all the problems in this society, and we are going to kill you.” This is the gist of the kind of letters to which Maia Lekow and Christopher King’s compelling Kenyan documentary The Letter refers. Featured on this year’s Durban International Film Festival, […]
DANCE REVIEW: ABOMHLABA(THI). SOMETHING REALLY MAGICAL happens when you watch the give and take of three young bodies threading and knotting yarns between each other and the African soil that covers the world in Musa Hlatshwayo’s dance work Abomhlaba(thi), on this year’s Jomba Dance Festival, hosted by the […]
FILM REVIEW: SAKAWA. THE ADVENT OF the internet and social media offered the sex work industry interesting avenues of digression. They’re avenues which take the notion of exploitation to a new, international height, as they present an understanding of sex work which doesn’t involve actual physical intimacy, but […]
FILM REVIEW: TONI MORRISON: THE PIECES I AM. WHAT IS THE holy fire that gives a documentary film, muscle? The thing that makes a doccie shimmer with the same kind of sexiness as a fictional thriller, bringing in audiences thirsty to learn and curious to understand, and rendering […]
FILM REVIEW: MOTHER TO MOTHER. WHAT DO YOU say to the woman whose daughter your son has murdered? This is the nub of Sindisiwe Magona’s fictional tale, Mother to Mother, about the murder of Amy Biehl, a young American graduate who came to South Africa, an anti-apartheid activist. […]
MANY OF US can see the flaws in our country’s leadership. Not many of us have the balls, the centrality of total focus – and maybe the naiveté – to think we can take it on and bring a happier face to a country battered by violence and […]
FILM REVIEW: BANKSY, MOST WANTED. ARE YOU, PERHAPS, Banksy in your private life? Do you slip out of context, don a workman’s overall and become invisible as you paint clever mischief through stencils or spray cans onto unsuspecting public walls? The core of sheer documentary gold is to […]
FILM REVIEW: FOR SAMA. SAY THE WORDS ‘Aleppo’ and ‘2016’ and if you have had a quarter of an ear on the news during that period, you will shiver with the memory of appalling atrocities perpetrated against Syrian civilians. In her intimate, multi-award-winning documentary, journalist Waad al-Kateab offers […]
FILM REVIEW: DAYS OF CANNIBALISM. IF YOU OFFER a man the right price, you can get him to give you his land to rape and pillage. It is this horrible reflection that is implicit in Teboho Edkins’s astonishing documentary on the Chinese migrants of Lesotho. Entitled Days of […]
FILM REVIEW: THE KINGMAKER. THINK OF THE name Imelda Marcos and the image of 3 000 pairs of shoes might come to mind. This little anecdote rode on the back of accusations of the alleged ill-gotten gains of this former First Lady of the Philippines who took power […]
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