viewReactionary Review | Landmyn | dir: Nico Scheepers
Landmyn ebbs and seethes through a winter family holiday by the beach.
Siblings Colette, Johan and Lisa, one returned from a career in London (or Scotland) apparently making coffee, the other an up and coming playwright and director (plainly the autobiographical hinge of the film – you can tell this because the other characters accuse him of being pretentious) and their younger sister, who is rebelling, presumably as she has dyed her hair red. The three of them find themselves at a beach house somewhere in the Cape, paid for by the older sister, who breaks the news that their mother is coming as well. Portent sets in. Who pays for what is where the faultlines lie.
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by Roger Young
“Dolly Parton — love her. She nursed her ill husband till the end. She looked like a complete floozy, but she was a strong and deep human being. RIP.” — Helen Zille
After Dolly Parton’s death last week the DA leader and current Johannesburg Mayoral hopeful Helen Zille tweeted the above – in her words, a “compliment” as tribute to the star’s passing, which sparked a mild middle-class outrage.
In Zille’s defence, she was not calling Parton a floozy, she was saying that she looked like a floozy. Parton herself famously said that, “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.” Zille was merely riffing on this famous line.
But looking “like a floozy” and looking “this cheap” are two very different statements.
an interview with Boima Tucker
Boima Tucker has spent the last few years making a film about extraction, energy, colonialism and the slightly uncomfortable question of what happens when the people who need development most are also the people expected to pay for it. After Oil moves between South Africa, Kenya and Western Sahara, following communities negotiating very different versions of the same global system.
The first question I had when I saw that The Haven Night Shelter are promoting, along with the CCID, a Homeless Golf Day was… When do the unhoused find the time to practice their swing?
However, the unhoused will probably not be invited to the Clovelly golf course, the event is instead to raise money to provide mobile ablutions to the homeless of Cape Town. Clovelly has around 1,550 members, with roughly 164 people playing the course on an average day. So the Golf Day is bound to attract some attention.
on Data Centres, Funeral Parlours, and Socrates.
by Roger Young
“The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to average citizens of the same society forms a determinate system which has its own life; one may call it the collective or common conscience.”
— The Division of Labour in Society — Durkheim
This is an essay about systems overwhelming human capacity to perceive the whole, and I am currently overwhelmed by information that the system has given me in support of the vague feeling I had that this was a thing. The structure document was generated in the no-time of machine intelligence. Humanity is time.
I Hardly Remember Their Names
From her kitchen in a container near the rank she arrives at night, scolding and so on, in a huff of takeaway styrofoam containers and things exchanged for left over food. Dadoh settles in to the office chair Jimmy spends his days in.
“No ma, she’s working next door right now.”
Unless Nontle is there, then civility abounds.
viewReactionary Review | Benaaihilism | Van Pletzen
Benaaihilism has to be the dumbest album released in recent times. Big, dumb, and 3am Eternal beautiful. This is a collection of songs entirely for driving from Pretoria to Stellenbosch to meet a girl at Aandklas, and discovering she’s hooked up with someone else, and getting brandy and coke existential about it.
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an interview with Sandulela Asanda
Sandulela Asanda went to an all-girls boarding school, and has now made a feature about going to an all-girls boarding school. Black Burns Fast is out in cinemas countrywide as of last Friday, after a massive festival run that included DIFF last year. Following our review, we tried to figure out how she got from Mirror Mirror, her DIFF-winning short film, to screening her first feature in so many cinemas and doing so many goddamn interviews.
An Interview with Guy Buttery
Guy Buttery was recently nominated for three SAMAs for Orchestrations — Album of the Year, Best Instrumental and Best Engineered. The album, released last year after 12 years in the making, took shape across a dozen countries, involving different orchestras, string players and musicians along the way. This weekend he returns to the Hilton Arts Festival with multi-instrumentalist Quintin Song.
viewDIFF26 | From Dust We Spin | dir: Julia Jansch | 85mins
SC8 | Friday 31st July | 7pm
Waaabap-bap-bap. A story as old as time. Sometimes you just want to donut until your tyres come off, and the government won't let you.
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