Andrea

Demelza Bush 5min

“Andrè/a” is the very personal and touching story of Andrea Mulder, a male to female transexual living in Grahamstown with her wife and son. Andrea only came out as a transexual in her fifties and in this documentary she talks about learning how to live and behave as a female, the social pressures she faced to “be a man” while she was growing up as well as what it feels like to finally be able to be herself. The main aim of “Andrè/a” is to deconstruct society’s need to other people who are different from the ‘norm’ and prove that inside, we are all the same.
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Backstreet Abortion

Tasmin Vosloo 5min

In 1993 abortion was made legal in South Africa with certain limitations. Despite this, the number of ‘backstreet’, illegal abortions is increasing rapidly. Access to adequate healthcare is not always a viable option for women and the consequences are severe, with bogus abortionists and street doctors preying on desperate, uneducated and vulnerable women. Backstreet Abortions is an investigation into illegal abortions, specifically a man named “Dr Khan” who conducts “safe & pain-free” abortions at any stage of a women’s pregnancy.
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Care

David ‘Joe’ Edmeades 5min

Alicedale is typical of many small towns in South Africa, a place of extreme poverty, with townspeople that are under-educated and unemployed. Alicedale lost most of its hope after the collapse of the railways in South Africa. However there are always certain individuals who strive to make a difference within their community. For the past 10 years Alicedale Community Richening Empowerment (CARE), an organisation directed by Pumla Gojela assisted by a few women volunteers has set out with a vision of creating community and social upliftment in Alicedale. This insert demonstrates the positive impact the organisation’s work is having on the children and women within the community.
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Dreamcatcher

Hayley Mueller 5min

The smell of hay, candy-floss, strange dancing bears. The circus is a surreal space into which most people escape from their ‘normal’ daily lives. Meet someone who lives only within this space. No longer in the circus, Uwe still carries its ideals into his life: he refuses to conform to society’s expectations of him and has found himself a space on its fringes, close to nature and living a lifestyle which suits him.
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I know what I said

Jade Menenzies 5min

Siyanda Futhu-Futhu is a young aspiring Kwaito artist. Although he has won various awards over the years, none have been more important than the award he recently received – the Cacadu Achievers Award. With this award he gets a once in a lifetime opportunity to record in the Miriam Makeba Centre of Performing Arts. Working in the centre with a host of trained professionals and state of the art equipment, he produced his very first 10 track album. Watch Siyanda as he discusses his music career so far.
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Flight or fright

Lindsey Thorpe 5min

It is unnatural not to have fear. Overcoming that fear makes you a stronger and more courageous individual. Joos Vos, from EP Skydivers in Grahamstown knows all about fighting fear. In this short documentary Joos takes Kirsten, a first time skydiver on the flight of her life. Will she find the strength to flee or will she soar?
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Fly Girls

Ashley Nash 5min

“If girls were meant to fly the sky would be pink…” Reflected in this popular quotation is the notion that female pilots are in some way inferior to their male counterparts. ‘Fly Girls’ challenges this assumption by observing why the aviation industry is male-dominated and also looks at how women cope with this. Eva Njambi and Leanne Whitfield from 43 Air School in Port Alfred shared their views.
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Forest Phantoms

Pippa Erlich 5min

The Knysna elephant is an integral part of the area’s culture and history. They have captured the imaginations of artists and writers and the attention of various environmentalists. At the beginning of the millennium, it was thought that the original herd of over 500 animals had been decimated to a point where there was only one old matriarch left. Modern researchers have suggested that there are more.
Forest Phantom explores the mysterious connection between humans, the elephants and the forest in which they live, through the attitudes and stories of people who have been connected to them during the last 50 years.
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Love in a time of HIV

Rulleska Singh 5min

With South Africa’s HIV instances soaring and stigma towards the disease on a high, this piece aims to highlight that people with HIV are no different. Using love as the example, Love in a time of HIV follows a couple who fell in love and are both HIV positive; their hopes, plans and life. I hope that this piece will be a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, the manageability of HIV and the hope of a stigma-fee South Africa.
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people are beautiful

Joni Els 5min

Life as a paranoid schizophrenic. An evocative portrait of someone diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. This piece shows the unsettling yet beautiful nature of everyday life, as told by an out patient from the Fort England Hospital of Grahamstown.
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She’s come undone

Xoli Matomela 5min

A look inside the world of a lady who has given her life to the oldest profession. This story comes completely from her, a stream of conscioiusness, a diary entry, an unravelling of how she has come undone.
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The bigger picture

Anthony Andrews 5min

When most people think about celibacy, if at all, they think of deprivation, like choosing to not eat a very good piece of chocolate cake. Even if you don’t think of it that way perhaps you try to rationalise or understand it using another metaphor. This is to be expected since most of us try to understand new concepts using a metaphor in our own mental archive, or at least that’s what the psychologists tell us. This short film tries to understand celibacy using a new and different metaphor, one which you might not agree with but one which might help you understand this strange and possibly new concept. It is a positive metaphor, one which tries to explain what celibacy is and not what it is devoid of. Along the way you will meet two marvellous people who put faces to the concepts and metaphors.
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Wanda/Woman

Gabrielle Gray 5min

Wanda Fourie is a female body builder from East London, South Africa. Competing in a typically “masculine” sport not only has the physical effects that one would expect, but takes its it toll on all aspects of one’s life. Wanda gives insight into her daily routine as she prepares for the Border Body Building competition, a run-up to the South African National competition. As we follow her progress, we discover how body-building has ultimately changed Wanda’s life…for the better.
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We hope we have Mercy

Dan Calderwood 5min

‘We hope we have mercy’ is a short documentary highlighting one of the many areas of ‘The Zimbabwean Crisis’ which often goes unnoticed. Zimbabwe’s black and white rhinos are being poached to near extinction by the people in power. This is the shocking story of man’s greed and the awful repercussions to a once flourishing nation’s wildlife. It is about both the rhino and the many people involved in fighting for this species survival, for “what is man without the beast?”
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RUTV cleans up SABC Student News Awards

Ashleigh Nash, Joni Els & Hayley Mueller at the Sun City Awards

Ashleigh Nash describes her award winning night.
The annual SABC News Awards were held at Sun City in the North West province on Saturday, 13 September. As a nominee in the student category of ‘TV Current Affairs’ I was lucky enough to be invited to represent the Rhodes Journalism TV department and my crew for the weekend.
Rhodes Journalism had a strong presence at the awards with two of my television classmates nominated in the same category. From the moment we arrived, we felt like celebrities, having our own rooms and a personal chauffeur. The fact that this was a golf cart driver whom we paid to drive us a mere 1km made no difference. We were queens of the Lost City, where we found our childhood again by making waves on the lazy river and screaming down the dark tarantula slide. Although our time was interspersed with a rehearsal and a run though of the event, we had to admit that the awards were the reason we were there! (more…)

RUTV4 Tech Diaries – the hottest stuff

These are the notes we have writen up as tech guides for TV to show how we are getting in touch with the inner geek. Om wmv.

Tony Andrews’ Tech Diary

Demelza Bush’s Tech Diary

Joe Edmeades’ Tech Diary

Gabbi Gray’s Tech Diary

Jade Menezies’ Tech Diary

Hayley Mueller’s Tech Diary

Ashley Nash’s Tech Diary

Rulleska Singh’s Tech Diary

Lindsey Thorpe’s Tech Diary

Tasmin Vosloo’s- Tech Diary