PICTURE THE SCENARIO: You’re on the cusp of adulthood, the eldest of many children. Contrary to your father’s wishes, you have decided to be educated. It’s the late 19th century and your mother supports this great wish of yours to make a life for yourself. And it’s all […]
LOSS. IT’S A wound that can open at any time. An absence that will change your life forever, in ways that you cannot fathom. The complexities of bereavement are under the loupe in Narcosis, an extraordinary and deep film from the pen of Martijn de Jong. One of […]
PUT TWO PASSIONATE intellectuals together in a remote chalet in the French Alps. Add an almost disabled tween and his seeing-eye Border Collie, and sprinkle more publishing success on the one than on the other, and you get some extraordinary fireworks. Toss in a sudden violent death, and […]
HE HAS EYES like lamplights: big and bright. He cries vocally when he is very sad. And sniffs when he’s feeling miserable. You can see the tears staining his face. His emotions take him away from peccadilloes like carrots from human hands. This is Eo, a small grey […]
FORTY-ONE YEARS AGO, Paul Slabolepszy’s play Saturday Night at the Palace rocked the theatre-going sensibilities of South Africa. This was art so close to the mirror that it reeked and terrified. It’s enjoying a season currently at the Joburg Theatre, under the direction of Albert Maritz and it […]
SAY THE WORD ‘Fiddler’ in the film context to virtually anyone you meet, and they will know exactly what you mean. Fiddler on the Roof is like Van Gogh’s ear or Beethoven’s Fifth, in a broader cultural sphere. It’s also up there as the pinnacle of shlock culture […]
IF YOU DIDN’T know it was true, you’d deem it unbelievable. That’s Angela Merkel’s charmed life: It fits the parameters of a classical fairy tale. Clever girl born into marginalised village grows up to see democracy happen and later to become the country’s chancellor and lead it on […]
SHE WAS A feminist before it was fashionable, a French Impressionist born in Pennsylvania, a woman painter in a man’s world. She took intaglio printmaking by the horns and created arguably one of the world’s most valuable collections of images. This was Mary Cassatt. Her story Mary Cassatt: […]
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, […]
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 […]
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