Arts Fest spotlight on SA film
26 June 2007
Feel-good comedy, urban crime and metaphysical mayhem get played out on screen in the South African film programme at the 2007 National Arts Festival kicking off in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape on Thursday.
The local line-up is headed by the SA première of Aryan Kaganoff's SMS Sugar Man, the first feature-length film to have been shot entirely on cellphone. A programme of short pieces by Kaganoff will also be screened.
Regardt van den Bergh's iconic Faith Like Potatoes (2006) will continue to move both believers and non-believers, while another local heart-warmer, John Barker's Bunny Chow (2006), offers a roller coaster ride with three comedians en route to the Oppikoppi rock music festival.
Politically subtle and intimate, Khalo Matabane's Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon (2005) tells of the pain of an asylum-seeker, while Gustav Kuhn's Ouma se Slim Kind (2006) tells of another kind of displacement, that of a handicapped child trying to make his way in a harsh world.
After the Rain - the Director's Cut (1999) is Ross Kettle's own version of this tightly plotted drama involving a "troopie", his girlfriend and a black man. Also filmed for the international market, Neal Sundstrom's Dead Easy (2005) is an erotic thriller set in a South African advertising agency.
Actor/director/producer Akin Omotoso, the 2007 Standard Bank Young Artist award winner for film, presents two programmes of his short pieces, including episodes from A Place Called Home. Two full-length features, God is African and Gums & Noses, will also be screened. Omotoso directed the first and co-produced the second, and he will be present to introduce and discuss the work.
International line-up
This year's international line-up at Grahamstown includes 13 releases from the past two years that have provoked much discussion.
These include Ken Loach's The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Todd Field's Little Children, Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man, Clement Vigo's Lie with Me and Ruba Nadda's Sabah, about a 40-something Muslim woman who dons a swimming costume and goes in search of a man.
Also screening are two films by Scottish directors set in Africa: Michael Caton-Jones' Shooting Dogs, set in Rwanda at the time of the genocide, and Kevin Macdonald's The Last King of Scotland.
The 2007 film programme also feature five movies by Mexican filmmakers, including Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men (2006), Jorge Ramiraz-Suarez's Rabbit on the Moon (2004), and two films by Guillermo del Toro: Pan's Labyrinth (2006) and The Devil's Backbone (2001).
Four of dark masterpieces by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, made between 1969 and 1974, will also be shown, as well as a complete retrospective of work by Russian great Andrei Tarkovsky, juxtaposed with four films by a contemporary Russian, Karen Shakhnazarov.
In addition to the main film festival, there is a programme of short South African films on the Festival Fringe.
For more information, see the related articles on the right - and visit the National Arts Festival website.
SouthAfrica.info reporter
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