‘God’s work’ is a film about ghosts and trains and broken promises. Of a brother eternally a child in the initiate’s white clay. Of a drug lord with a machete called Verwoerd, and a vast room of the dead. Of a woman who has waited one year for a train.
It’s about the wiliness of a five-year-old and the mess of political and geographical possibilities in the interstices of the Cape Flats and what can happen in the blink of an eye to a child who recognises an ostensibly friendly grown-up’s hand, without analysing it or colouring it in fear.
Pillowman darkly brings together very difficult moral values. Without a clear sense of political context, the work is like a conventional police whodunnit with a good cop/bad cop motif. It’s also like an expose of a dictatorial regime. And finally it confronts Jewish and Chinese identity, mental disability and murder.
GENTRIFICATION. IT’S AN issue you cannot be passive about, particularly if you have axes to grind and stakes you’ve planted in the decaying area under question. Brent Palmer’s play King George takes on the behemoth of city life in all its glory and shabbiness, and he wins. It’s […]
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 […]
Sometimes it takes a relatively small conflagration to set the whole world on fire and let it burn to the ground. Alexander Nanau’s brilliant documentary Collective tells a story that will trigger your sense of urgency as it will trouble your gut. It features on this year’s Encounters […]
CENTURIES OF ITALIAN vendetta and the true story of Tommaso Buscetta, a lynchpin of the Sicilian mafia, who famously called upon the law in his bid to turn informant, falls under the loupe of director Marco Bellocchio’s The Traitor. This is a work nothing short of brilliant. It […]
FILM REVIEW: MOTHER TO MOTHER. WHAT DO YOU say to the woman whose daughter your son has murdered? This is the nub of Sindisiwe Magona’s fictional tale, Mother to Mother, about the murder of Amy Biehl, a young American graduate who came to South Africa, an anti-apartheid activist. […]
The sickening cycle of bullying and abuse is central to Evil, an important and compelling work which takes the nub of what makes men try and break one another and dissects it. Not only a foray into the complexity of society and behaviour, the work is taken to […]
IT WAS ALWAYS the love affair to end all love affairs and give birth to a myriad of platitudes and clichés about the universal tale of boy meeting girl, in spite of social barriers, and boy loving girl in the midst of catastrophe. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has […]
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