Don’t Miss Heritage Cape Town

Monique January feels the power of a different beauty pagaent

Beauty no longer has one fixed face and body representing it, it comes in all forms, shapes and sizes. While including various physical appearances may seem like the end goal, real beauty is the deeper ideological meaning associated with beauty. This is the prize.
Miss Heritage Cape Town tells an empowering story of surpassing normative beauty standards and celebrating more voluptuous unconventional woman seen through the lens of 20-year-old Olwaba Nkuzi. (more…)

Women – as the first recourse

Leago Mamabolo meets women helping themselves develop their art

There is great value and importance in documenting yourself- particularly for disenfranchised groups who have historically been left out of the picture. Given this, it is no surprise why Zanele Muholi, a South African woman and internationally renowned visual artist, would lead the inspirational project of a Women’s Mobile Museum (WMM). Muholi describes photographing yourself as “giving yourself a voice”. (more…)

Displaced

Khethiwe Shobede is less than impressed with a documentary on the Holocaust

Displaced is a documentary film directed by Sharon Ryba-Kahn centred around the experience of a third-generation survivor of the Nazi Holocaust and the difficult conversations that still surround the topic. While this exploration of people’s experience of memory and genocide is an interesting and insightful ‘idea’ for a documentary the film itself fails to deliver. It does ask important questions about the effects of the Holocaust three generations after the actual events took place. (more…)

Bellingcat key shifts citizen journalism

Michael Taylor reviews a memorable documentary that questions the truth of headline news challenged by internet investigators

Bellingcat: Truth in a Post Truth World offers a fascinating insight into the world of citizen journalism, telling the story of the individual’s working for the titular Bellingcat investigative news website. Over the course of its 89 minute, Bellingcat goes into detail about the innovative methods that citizens can use to fact check the information that we are presented with on a daily basis. This is all derived from social media, Google Earth and other open source internet data. (more…)

Love conquers all in Blend

Monique January reviews a powerful story of an interracial relationship

South Africa’s historical racial dynamics still loom in the present in interracial relationships like Monique and Leonard’s and remain constant reminders of the past despite the fight to move forward. (more…)

A miss of The Bisho Massacre

Temba Mkosi questions the film’s account of history

This short film directed by Petunia Mokoena is as gripping as most of the political documentaries made about the history of South Africa. The Bisho Massacre: Who Pulled the Trigger? explores the chilling accounts of the 1992 Bisho Massacre involving the African National Congress and the Ciskei Defence Force – a bloody chapter on the road to the first democratic elections of South Africa in 1994. The massacre is one of many events that remain swept under the carpet of South African history much like the 2012 Marikana Massacre involving the SAP. (more…)