Reactionary 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.
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.
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.
DIFF26 | From Dust We Spin | dir: Julia Jansch | 85mins
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.
Reactionary Reviews | Black Burns Fast | dir: Sandulela Asanda | 95mins
Black Burns Fast gets right into it upfront, announcing and dispensing with setup and exposition in teen rapid-fire dialogue, overcompensating, overstating, and shrugging all at the same time. Self-consciously un-self-conscious. It would be easy to be mean about the overacting teens, but you know what? Teens overact irl.
From Mel Gibson to Jason Statham, the Afrikaner villain has long been a trope in Hollywood cinema, but after Elon Musk saying distinctly Bond Villain type things in that accent, it’s no longer just Auret, Vosloo and Copley getting punched in the face, international stars are starting to get in on the act.
DIFF26 | Who Is Still Alive (2025) | Nicolas Wadimoff | 1h 53m
There are no statistics here. There are no images of bombed-out buildings. No before-and-after satellite images of devastation. No discussions of political actors. These are nine people in a blacked-out studio talking of their love for Gaza, the land, the music, the people. Wadimoff resists the familiar grammar, and while the film sometimes grapples for imagery, the cumulative effect is human.
DIFF26 | Dance With Me (2025) | Dir: Romanuse Langa | 79 min
Dance With Me hits all the story beats but does not convincingly portray a universe with an interior life. The world feels inhabited. The cinematography is excellent. The premise is solid, a new take on the disgruntled teenager finding herself, this time through gumboot dancing. But the staging is uniformly awkward. Many of the plot points arrive without any sort of dramatic logic. The film happens because the script is written.
DIFF26 | Themba | dir: Luthando Mngomezulu | 62mins
SC6 | Friday 24 July | 8pm
People grieve differently. This is the premise of Mngomezulu’s Themba. The entire film is two people grieving differently, and misunderstanding each other’s grief. There is little plot business.
bios at the Durban International Film Festival 2026
A rolling index of bios reviews, interviews, essays and festival notes from DIFF 2026.
This page will be updated throughout the festival.