Category: Uncategorized

Blackness needs no context. It just is.

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 […]

Amy Biehl and our amputated pride

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. […]

My BFF: stolen by a sproglet

PODCAST REVIEW: MEGAN. SO, YOUR BEST friend finds herself “up the duff”. And you, who have decided that you will not have children, need to respond. This is the dilemma of Megan, played by Victoria Emslie, the sixth in the series of monologues, The End of the Line, […]

Love and tenderness in a time of Aleppo

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 […]

Slides of life

BOOK REVIEW: ASLEEP AWAKE ASLEEP. BEFORE DIGITAL CAMERAS deluged us with thousands of images, there were slides: small squares of film mounted in a cardboard frame and loaded into a container, each slide in its own slot. As each image passed before the light of a projector, it […]

The ecstacy of daily struggle

FILM REVIEW: CUNNINGHAM. HE REFUSED TO be known as ‘avant-garde’, but set fire to every dance cliché and rule that you can think of, in his outstanding and bold repertoire, answerable to no one. This was Merce Cunningham, celebrated in Alla Kovgan’s beautiful film, Cunningham, which features on […]