Category: Film

The boy who became a man who became a god

The name ‘Pablo Picasso’ has become idiomatic for so much: from superficial reflections on talent to car brands. But its associations have also become so completely flattened into a very narrow understanding of what this artist was all about, and why his work was important to the world. […]

A girl and the Bomb

WHAT WOULD YOU do if you discovered that your elderly mum, in her hand-knitted cardigan with her arthritic fingers, has had a secret life that is of great concern to the authorities? A life that involved nuclear plans and spies, sex and political manipulation? You might try to […]

The man who refused to regret punishment

WHEN YOU WATCH the political rhetoric being thrust hither and yon on social media and other young platforms, the one thing that you notice is its lack of nuance. Political diatribe in South Africa in 2019 paints white people as racists. Blanketly. Utterly regardless of their history or […]

For the love of Fanny Brice

WHEN THE UNIVERSE presents a possibility in your life that is unequivocally wrong, but still, it’s there, what do you do? A chance encounter with a literary letter when she was down and out and had no where to turn, represented an important turning point for American writer, […]

Films that last forever

WHEN YOU HAVE enough passion for something that is important to you, often the universe casts a fond eye in your direction and throws something your way to encourage you, even more. This was something that inveterate film-watcher Johann Botha (67), a semi-retired Pretoria resident experienced on February […]

Sow what you reap

FOR SO MANY years, South African film has suffered from what easily can be considered a kind of collective lack of self-esteem. Our film makers yearned to be American in their stories, their accents, their tricks of the medium. But for the past several years, there’s a thread […]