Tag: European Film Festival South Africa

Koenigsberger dumplings, your losses and mine

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.

New fruit in autumn

This film gives you a guttural love of the universe to take home with you. Stripped cleanly of platitudes, it is unabashedly about grabbing life in fists full of pungently ripe blackberries and holding on to one’s self-belief and one’s privacy, come what may.

Red herrings, anyone?

FRENCH CUISINE HAS a filmographic lure all of its own. It’s about copper-based skillets and the bouquet of finely aged wines, the pairing of unusual flavours and the digging in wet earth for just the right flavoured truffle that will be sensitively grated into a dish to create […]

Behind closed doors

SHE MINCES INTO the world with her highlights and her backless lace frock, all the bits and bobs of feminine je-ne-sais-quoi perfectly in place. She’s totally unaware of how crazily anomalous she is to her peers. She’s been made into a monster, but she’s too young to understand […]

Love is transient; land, forever

IF YOU TAKE a slice out of the formalities of matchmaking and weddings from Fiddler on the Roof, and slot it in alongside some of the more potent scenes involving the beautiful widow in Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek, sprinkle the concoction rather heavily with romanticised farmgirl wholesomeness, […]

Eat together, stick together

WAR PRESENTS CASUALTIES on levels far wider than the conventional battle fields. There is the horror of a lack of closure, relentless vulnerability and ripples of hatred spewed in so many directions, conjoined as it often is, with ignorance. In The Old Oak, director Ken Loach takes on […]

Powder keg in the classroom

OVER THE LAST few years, our social world has become so painstakingly aware of the possibility of offending others, that something has been lost in our ability to be candid. This sensitive nerve in contemporary society is explored excruciatingly in The Teachers’ Lounge featuring Leonie Benesch. It’s on […]