Tsotsi: Violence and identity in South Africa

Thewre has been an interesting point of view expressed and a bit of critisism on Tsotsi in the Rochester City News.

"Even in emerging nations without a grand history of production, a new self awareness can sometimes inspire filmmakers to reflect an equally new sense of identity. Tsotsi, which recently won the Academy Award for best foreign film, indicates something of a new spirit in South Africa, a relatively old country with a relatively new form of government."

"...camera also, however, lingers far too long on the faces of the actors, who often simply look at each other for long periods, as if trying to make up their minds about a speech or a gesture. The heavy-handed technique needlessly overstates the emotion of the film's situations, adding false melodrama to several naturally tense of moving encounters. Tsotsi often seems crude and oversimplified, but its themes and contexts, and more importantly its national origin and its appearance here, represent an important step for South African film."

Read more here

Lucky short is all the rage

A 20 minute short film is currently taking the international film festival circuit by storm. LUCKY is written and directed by Briton Avie Luthra and produced by Durban based Junaid Ahmed. It tells the story of an Aids orphan desperate to leave his rural Zulu village for the bright lights of Durban.

Dollars & White pipes on DVD

Donovan Marsh's South African film Dollars & White Pipes, which provides an insightful look at the subculture of drugs and gang violence, releases in South Africa on DVD on Friday.

Ecounters doc fest deadline approaches

The closing date for submissions to South Africa's largest documentary festival is fast approaching, on 5 May 2006. Read more about it here. www.encounters.co.za.

The 2006 festival itself will take place:

• Johannesburg: Friday 14 July - Sunday 23 July
• Cape Town: Friday 21 July - Sunday 6 August

kwailawai* news

This blog has not been updated regularly for some time. I have put some though into what I should do with it. Just let it hang round cyberspace, unkept and unchanged, delete it, or continue working on it.

I decided to keep it and keep updating it, but it's focus will change. Instead of being about all South African culture related issues, it will only feature reviews of South African feature films and documentaries.

There are other websites that cater for SA industry film news, such as Screen Africa. This site will however still have news on SA film festival and the like, but much less so than before.

Thanks for understanding.

Wessel

mhambi: His big white self: Nick Broomfield becomes part of the story

Read a review on Mhambi of Nick Broomfield's second documentary on South Africa's extreme right wingers.

mhambi: His big white self: Nick Broomfield becomes part of the story

Nick Broomfield might not be aware of it, but His big white self his documentary on South African Eugene Terre'blanche and his Afrikaner Weerstands Beweging (AWB), follows a precedent established way back.

In 1834 The Spectator bemoaned the "maltreatment of the aborigines" and according to it, this had no equal in history. The Afrikaner colonists had a very bad press, starting at the turn on the nineteenth century by an account of the British traveler John Barow, and a few years later in a book by John Philip, a compatriot.