The director’s grounding in the principles of literature is immediately apparent. Milisuthando, the film, is structured over five chapters. Throughout, there’s an interweaving of devices, recurrent motifs, a playful use of cue and reference, supple vocabulary, and — most interesting in this genre of the personal essay — journalism’s mantras of ‘show, don’t tell’ and…
2020 is a big year for South African director’s making films about evil and cursed farmhouses! First out were the cosmic terrors of Richard Stanley’s Color Out of Space, that was followed by the Afrikaans drama Griekwastad—based on the horrific true life crimes of Don Steenkamp. And now, Netflix has released Harold Holscher’s 8 (also…
Moffie, the fourth feature of South African director Oliver Hermanus, is a coruscating look into the violent pathology and poisonous toxic masculinity of white South African society during apartheid. The film, whose stark and shocking title comes from a derogatory homophobic slur, is set in the early 1980s and follows the life of military conscript…
I once came across a quote by Steven Fry that read, “a true thing, poorly expressed, is a lie.” These words seemed to tumble around in the back of my mind as I made my way through the survey of Michael MacGarry’s films. Beginning with an animation made as a student in 1999, the exhibition…
“Find what you love and let it kill you” This quote from Charles Bukowski is Zandi Tisani‘s favourite quote, and quite fittingly came up in our conversation about her journey as a filmmaker. Discovering her love for film did not come from one particular moment, but rather from a series of related events. The desire…
