Leni Huyghe’s film ‘Real Faces’ casts a number of imperatives about being human, adult and independent in a social world, into the fabric of its tale, but none of them are offered as two dimensional imperatives. It’s a complex, beautifully edited piece of work, featuring Leonie Buysse and Gorges Ocloo.
It is Emma (Kaya Toft Loholt), the family’s younger daughter, who makes this work sing with a poignancy that hurts, it is so finely tuned. She’s a deadpan youngster, subject to the whims of grown-ups. Her passion lies in kicking the ball; she hates the colour pink and girly frocks.
Oliver Laxe’s film Sirât, could be the defining moment of this year’s European Film Festival in South Africa. It’s a tale in the here and now, conflating a music rave with an aggressive military presence, the fragility of life against the enormity of desert energy. It is magnificent, terrifying: simultaneously.
This beautiful tale of Chopin and Ravel brought to life on an out-of-tune piano features moody silences and devastatingly subtle filmography. It is a work about how one holds the deepest of pains and sharpest of taboos closest to one’s chest. Because words are tools too lumpen to describe them.
Sithole is like a contemporary South African Jane Austen in her work. The grand narrative in it all is the idea of a young woman nursing dreams of “Being the Bride” and living happily ever after. The first part, of course, is the headline and the rest, taken for granted.
The story paints a hopscotch series of leaps between 1880 and the present, in the light of rhino poaching, trophy hunting, illegal aliens and other such crimes, often leaving you on one cliff’s edge as a chapter ends, and finding you on another, 100 years later, as the next begins.
In ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, written by Oscar Wilde in 1899, it is the fresh directness of the set, and the articulate and unequivocal performances of the cast – in their bustles, snakeskin suits and all – that make it sing with a mix of cynicism, middle-finger-to-society chutzpah and sheer joy.
The production is delightful. It offers the now-57-year-old musical levity. As it opens, the lighting is rich with nuance. It feels like you’re gazing at a tableau of Rembrandt’s 1635 Belshazzar’s Feast not only for its colouration, but also in the evoked debauchery, teetering on the edge of biblical taboo.
‘The Moon Looks Beautiful From Here’ is Aldo Bincat’s beautiful and universal piece, written in simple language with a deft hand and clearly over a great many years of emotions spent and ideas thought and revisited, sometimes in great pain. It’s a touchstone work and a clear victory in storytelling.
‘The Tramp’ is punted as a pocket musical; it contains an immense ambit which peers into the complex life of a man who skirted controversy wherever he went. It holds you with beautiful performances and a set that strips the Chaplin name of cliche and gives analogue the upper hand.
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