ARE YOU — OR your children – simply bored with European fairy tales with all their pomp and circumstance, and men in Victorian-redolent powdered wigs and stockings with funny shoes, populating stories that have been told a million times and present platitudes at their most bland? Well, you […]
IT’S NOT EVERY day that you get to watch a film which forces you to re-examine who you are as a human being in the world. Not in the sense of a frilly tale told with universal platitudes, but from a hard-hitting, real perspective that has nothing to […]
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. […]
WHAT DO YOU do at the end of the year, when you’ve just broken up with your boyfriend and it’s time for a whole new take on life, the universe and everything? Why, you bond with your best friend, and embark on an all girls’ foray into the […]
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 […]
YOU’VE HEARD OF the Leprechaun, the Tokoloshe, Pinky-Pinky, Kalula the rabbit and others – fictional characters that represent the trickster values in a given culture. They’re made up yet believable, feisty and quirky, naughty and a touch sinister, but they evade the structures of society and crop up […]
YOU MAY THINK ‘contemporary classical African art’ and immediately call to mind, bright colours, concatenating against one another in mostly geometric patterns. You’re about a third right. Challenging preconceptions about what African art looks like, Kim Sacks has curated another wonderful exhibition, focusing on the black and white […]
A ROUGH-AROUND-THE EDGES young man, replete with a lot of bravado and a whirligig macho kind of engagement with the world, with all its women, deals and chance-taking, finds his comeuppance in a way that takes him – and will take you – by surprise. Paco Arango’s film […]
YOU MAY THINK of them as the creepy crawlies that make you scream when you see them by chance, the six-legged insects that populate the underbelly of our world but Gillian Katz has given life and love to a bunch of ‘goggas’ with their hard carapaces, their noisy […]
JUST WHEN YOU think your hero has met the greatest challenge he’s capable of weathering, he pops to the surface to return victorious again, all cleaned up with the scars on the inside. This is the message prominent in Michael Moer’s reworking and direction of Papillon for 2018 […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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