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Tag: European Film Festival South Africa

Sock puppets and dream chasers

WHEN YOU DEEM yourself capable of putting another person into a categorising box, you perform an act of unmitigated violence. And you can do this by simply calling those people ‘foreign nationals’, ‘migrants’, ‘others’, ‘a problem’, the list goes on. It’s a magic gesture which strips another person […]

Checks and balances

SOMETIMES A NOTHING of a story can be the perfect shell for a mix of humour, philosophy and drama. And with the fabulous Javier Bardem at the helm of The Good Boss, you can anticipate narrative magnetism. It’s on this year’s European Film Festival; designed to be hybrid, […]

I was my mother’s best friend

WHO WAS YOUR mother when she was a child? And would you have played with her, if you had met her when you both were eight years old? These ideas are, admittedly head-spinners all of their own. Without sensationalist hi-jinks, Céline Sciamma’s beautiful film, Petite Maman explores the […]

To wrestle God

WHAT WOULD YOU give to keep the dignity of your child intact? This is one of the central premises to Levan Koguashvili’s magnificent film Brighton 4th, a tale woven through the vagaries and indignities of immigrant culture, the unrelenting potency of gambling debt and the chequered messiness of […]

Benders to the end of time

FILMS WARNING SOCIETY of the dangers of alcohol addiction may come and go, but Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round will stay with you for a long time. This Danish work which is unequivocally the king of this year’s European Film Festival South Africa, is available without cost and online […]

Falling in love with Rosa

IF YOU NEED a pick-me-up story that touches on all the bases of being alive and rubbishes traditional values that don’t always have a fairy tale ending in real life, you need to imbibe Rosa’s Wedding. Directed by Icíar Bollaín, this Spanish film is unequivocally, the feisty nectar […]

Who is Zhenia? What is he?

YOU MAY BE forgiven for thinking you’ve keyed into a Neil Gaiman novel in the first few minutes of Malgorzata Szumowska and Michal Englert’s film Never Gonna Snow Again. Featuring Alec Utgoff as a young Russian with many unusual skills, the opening scene in this mysterious but beautiful […]

Of wings and pillow talk

LOSING A PARENT is immensely painful. Losing a parent suddenly can knock not only the wind out of you, but also a whole lot of unresolved issues into the ether. And some of them you may not want to revisit. This is how Antoinette Beumer focuses her complex, […]

Evil giants; hapless mermaids

HOW DO YOU tell your beautiful little six-year-old daughter that she faces a sheer cliff in terms of how the year ahead may look for her health? Little girls are supposed to be thinking about unicorns and mermaids, dragon slayers and princesses, not about whether their arms and […]