By Suzanne Belling After fighting leukaemia for over 20 years, actress, TV producer/director, comedienne, children’s poet, drama coach, teacher and grandmother Helen Heldenmuth succumbed to the side-effects of treatment and the disease itself on August 5. She was 78. There were so many facets to her that one could […]
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 […]
“IN MY NEXT project, I will be making a wildebeest out of 10 000 dried locusts that Wits University’s Zoo Museum curator has decommissioned and given me.” You wouldn’t expect a statement of that nature from anyone other than South African mosaic sculptor Hannelie Coetzee, whose work you can […]
AGEING IS A funny thing. Sure, it’s about vanity and keeping up appearances; it’s about reining in the metabolism and trying not to count the wrinkles, but it’s also about the clarity to say ‘no’ to things that you hate but would have been too polite to refuse […]
SAY THE NAME ‘Roger Ballen’ to certain people and you will get a rather judgemental and furious response, even before they know the context or the work being shown. Ballen on Film is a very important exhibition that should disengage all the Ballen nay-sayers, but it may well […]
A BEAUTIFULLY CRAFTED tale of loyalty and values learned and imbibed, Dalene Matthee’s novel Die Judasbok (The Scapegoat) translates with a true sense of Klein Karoo grit into an Afrikaans-language radio drama you won’t forget in a hurry. It’s an extremely sensitive and intelligent radio-adaptation that will haunt […]
WHAT ARE YOU, effectively, if you do not fit the basic identifiers of the people all around you? This question comes under the sensitive but probing and compelling loupe of newly released Afrikaans (with English subtitles) film, Vaselinetjie. Like British director Alan Bleasdale’s mini-series that interpreted Dickens’s Oliver […]
WRITING IS A messy business. It’s a mixture of grammar and correctness, of rhythm and texture, of perspective and controversy. But occasionally it can be so devastatingly lucid that a scene read more than 20 years ago, can still haunt. Irrevocably. Bruisingly. It takes a truly remarkable team […]
THE ACHIEVEMENT OF theatrical perfection is very rare. And when it happens, you have to grab it with both hands, and make a point of seeing it, whatever it takes. The Afrikaans rendition of the 1989 American story of an elderly white woman and her black driver seems […]
THERE’S NOTHING QUITE like a dollop of Brel on a cold winter evening to warm the cockles of your heart. Embraced as schmaltz by generations of song-lovers everywhere, the rough and drunken, sad and maudlin brilliance of Belgian singer/songwriter Jacques Brel (1929-1978) bring together a mix of wisdom […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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