 | 87% of Americans believe angels exist. Idiots. In Outside Satan, tres cool French director, Bruno Dumont, whose drifty overlong 29 Palms has the best surprise male rape in cinema, gives the awful EU the debased avenging angel it so richly deserves. A stubby bow-legged drifter (David Dewaele) who sleeps rough and has the smooshed, runty face of a very bad boxer. He’s trash, really. A gypsy. Drinks beer, boinks backpackers and literally sucks malefic spirits from the throats of pre-adolescent ...read more |
Outside Satan
Monday, July 23rd, 2012 by Brandon Edmonds
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Umbilical Chords
Sunday, June 24th, 2012 by Tara Fataar
 | Sarah Ping Ni Jones started making the self-reflective documentary, Umbilical Cords years before she realized how the unfolding of real-life events would have a major effect on the tension of the film and on the course of her and co-film-maker and boyfriends Jean’s life. ...read more |
East African Badonkadonk
Thursday, June 21st, 2012 by Kavish Chetty
 | This evening: a double dosage of East African sexuality. Together, these two documentaries produce an ambiguous portrait of an already penumbral theme. Sexuality in Africa comes across to us in a phantasmagoric flow of nastiness: teary clitoridectomies, foreskins slashed at with bloodied butcher knives, the incarceration and torture of homosexuals (a “European invention”), the corrective rape of lesbians, gang-banging as a rite of masculinity – and then perhaps most recognisably, that dark comic quotation coasting the circuits of the internet: ...read more |
Port Nolloth | Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Wednesday, June 20th, 2012 by Andy Davis
 | It was an early morning in Elands Bay. Cold. Cranking. I had just crawled out of the tent, pitched illegally in the night, on the point, right in front of the break. As I scratched my balls and contemplated my wet wetsuit I heard the growl of a quadbike at about the same time as I saw the thing zooming towards me. The guy driving was wearing old Bear tracksuit pants, a windbreaker and a green Springbok beanie to keep ...read more |
A Black Cowboy Riding a Dolphin
Wednesday, April 25th, 2012 by Lindokuhle Nkosi, images by Matthew Pappas
 | Since late last year, a mysterious unknown artist “of African descent” has been slowly edging his way into our musical consciousness. For months now, all we had was a song, a distorted image and a name – Alekesam. In March this year, an EP was released featuring a Spoek Mathambo remix of the single “It’s not you, It’s here”. The song is loop heavy. Dripping in waxy liquid tones laid over each other layer by thick layer. It’s an R’n ...read more |
Christopher and his Kind
Wednesday, March 28th, 2012 by Kavish Chetty
 | Sexual innuendo of a certain cast is the holy province of a homosexual audience, and Chris and his Kind tailors its affections and affectations accordingly. A young man bursts open a bottle of champagne, and as its foamy ejaculate thickly drips off his fingers, his girlfriend says “oh, you must teach me to catch it in my mouth!”. Another young man sits opposite a lechy-looking train passenger – both headed to Berlin – who asks of him, “are you going ...read more |
Lucky
Tuesday, March 20th, 2012 by Kavish Chetty
 | So here’s the thing about being “heart-tugging” or “heart-warming”: pull too hard, turn the heat up too high, and you’re going to cause a cardiac arrest. I have elsewhere voiced my anxieties about schmaltz, saying of its usual superlatives, that “touching” is a euphemism for (emotional) molestation and “uplifting” has an erectile suggestion. Pleasingly, Lucky manages to attain an admirable balance, refusing the graceless lurch towards the sodden and soppy to which so many of its cinematic brethren succumb. ...read more |
Forerunners: The Black Middle-Class
Monday, March 19th, 2012 by Kavish Chetty
 | First wave of nausea: this black dame on a golfing green in argyle and khaki shorts. She’s musing on the philosophical complexities of the game, saying “every hole represents a new possibility” (oh they do, baby, especially when we be making lurve). She sidles up to about ten inches from the hole, takes a courageous swing at the ball and misses the target altogether – kind of like this documentary (Forerunners) does for fifty minutes. It’s at the site of ...read more |
The Artist
Friday, March 16th, 2012 by Kavish Chetty
 | “The most beautiful film I ever fell asleep in,” said a friend of L’Avventura by Michelangelo Antonioni. At the purer levels of experience you can bathe in that gorgeous, sea-faring adventure in ennui for only so long. Then, the afflictions of its satiric middle-class become your own: bored, endless, without structure, made-up exquisitely with nowhere to go. It is defeated by its own object of critique and yet its aesthetic attractions (its languid beauty, splendid locations) are no less whole ...read more |
Man On Ground
Thursday, March 1st, 2012 by Kavish Chetty
 | Akin Omotoso is arrestingly important. He commands the depthless insight to direct cinema into the territory of the real. He urges to reclaim our cinema culture from the grand and agitated black holes which are absorbing dogmas from across the Atlantic, splaying them ruinously onto our shores. Yet, on the purer levels of experience, Man on Ground only deadens the senses. His admirable ambitions have been met with collision. Hmm, this is a severe thing to write, perhaps more severe ...read more |
