While ostensibly a horror, because the mystery is explained early on and the main villain is so sympathetic, you could also see 8 as a supernatural drama. Set in 1970s South Africa, Mary is an orphan living with her aunt and uncle, as they move back to their family farm. There she meets Lazarus, a…
Poppie Nongena is about a woman, who finds out the week before Christmas that she has now been deemed an illegal immigrant in the country of her birth. The film is set 1970s apartheid South Africa, when the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act deported black South Africans to territories the government had assigned to each ethnicity.…
I wanna go to Sao Vicente, it looks amazing chill. Also weird. A place where everyone is an artist, everyone has a passion, everyone is creative. People are never introduced as storekeeper, but storekeeper/cinephile, their engagement with and contribution to the cultural life of the island is acknowledged and validated. Kmedeus is a film memorialising…
How To Steal A Country is a documentary on the Gupta state capture scandal that ended Jacob Zuma’s presidency. I remember hearing about the state corruption reports at the time, but watching this, it was so much worse than I remember. Apparently almost 1 trillion rand was funnelled out of public coffers under Zuma’s tenure.…
The Psychosis of Whiteness is a film essay analysing the movies Amistad, Belle, and Amazing Grace for how they create a false narrative around transatlantic slavery, in which white people are the central protagonists acting as saviours to agency-less black people, in order to propagate and perpetuate the myths and delusions around those historic crimes,…
Beautiful and intimate documentary about Samuel, a gay Kenyan, who is considering coming out to his family now that he has met the love of his life, Alex. This film for me was about the universalities and uniqueness of queer people’s stories. Every queer person watching this can identify with growing up receiving the message…
This film is fucking gorgeous. Beyond My Steps in a documentary following the Contemporary Dance Company of Angola as the dancers rehearse for the performance of the piece (De)construction. Choreographed by Monica Anapaz, the piece deals with construction and deconstruction of central cultural themes of identity, place, tradition and change. The cinematography of this film…
I Loved So Much is a documentary about Fadma, a 75-year-old woman who has lived an incredible life. Firstly, I LOVED Fadma. She is an absolute legend. There is nothing better than a wee auld granny who tells it straight. She shies away from nothing, and calls everything as she sees it. She has such…
The Mayor’s Race follows Labour politician Marvin Rees’s journey to becoming elected mayor of Bristol. This made him only the third Black British mayor in the UK, and the first to be directly elected by voters. It’s hard to talk about this film without getting into a whole conversation about politics, and I mean what…
Day of the Flowers is about two Scottish sisters travelling to Cuba to scatter their estranged dad’s ashes. Rosa is a crunchy activist, who has taken all the idealism of her father’s early years, romanticising his time spent doing solidarity work in Cuba when her parents were first married. Ailie is a stylish good-time girl,…