As restrictions are lifted and cinemas attempt to get back to pre-pandemic normality the Durban International Film Festival migrates from its pandemic online only incarnation to a mix of online and live screenings for this year’s edition, currently underway. As always there are a wide variety of feature films, documentaries and short films from around the world to choose from. Here are a selection to make the job a little easier as the festival enters its last week.
FEATURE FILMS
NOSTALGIA
Italian auteur Mario Martone elegantly unravels this meditation on the past and future of his beloved city of Naples in this drama about an Italian expatriate living in Cairo. He returns to Naples and finds the streets of his homeland provide both memories of home and evidence of a new way of life that's intriguing but unfamiliar. It’s a personal journey for the protagonist that also inevitably ends up bringing him into contact with the inescapably seedy criminal underworld. The romantic, sentimental exploration of the footpaths and memories of his home come crashing down in the face of its gritty present.
PLAYING THROUGH
This solid sports drama tells the little known story of the groundbreaking African American female golfer Ann Gregory who broke through the segregationist era racial divisions to rise to the top of the sport. The film focuses on a match between Gregory and a southern belle “great white hope” opponent in Georgia in 1959 and then jumps back and forth in time to tell the backstories of the two women and show how they were more alike than the press had the public believe as they battled against racial and sexual prejudice on the greens.
THE CROSSING
Burkina Faso director Irene Tassembedo’s tangled social drama explores the many layers of the modern refugee experience. The story follows a man who spent many years in Italy and returns to Burkina Faso where he helps to train a group of young people hellbent on making their own dangerous journey to Europe in search of a better life. As the preparation for the difficult trip progresses, the motivations and mettle of the group are challenged as the realities of what they're planning and the consequences they'll face force them to make tough decisions about what they want and where their allegiances lie.
THE STRANGER
Selected as Palestine’s Oscar entry last year, Syrian filmmaker Ameer Fakher Eldin’s drama offers a claustrophobic, gloomy portrait of the little seen reality of life in the contested Golan Heights. Its main character is Adnan, a struggling unlicensed medical doctor who spends his days depressed because of the seemingly inescapable hopelessness of the simmering political conditions in the region and the pressures of his domestic life.
This is until he meets a man who's been wounded in the war in Syria and helps to nurse him back to health. It’s slow moving and heavy on atmosphere but ultimately it's a rewarding portrait of the existential desperation that's become a part of the lived reality of those struggling to eke out a normal existence in the ever present fog of an endless war.
GOOD MADAM
Jenna Cato Bass takes the familiar South African domestic worker/employer relationship and uses it as the basis for a creepy racial psychological horror. When a young single mother is forced by her family to leave her house in the townships of Cape Town, she and her daughter seek refuge in the Constantia house where her mother diligently works for a mysterious, very ill, wealthy white woman. Things become increasingly terrifying and macabre as it appears that the “good madam” of the title may be far more powerful and creepily malicious than she seems.
YOU’RE MY FAVOURITE PLACE
Director Jahmil X.T. Qubeka continues to mine his beloved Eastern Cape for rich story material in this impressive genre mash up that’s part uncompromising teenage drama, part road trip and part spiritual chiller.
When three disillusioned matric friends from East London decide to take a much needed escape trip to the legendary Hole in the Wall - where it’s said you can hear the dead speak - they get far more than they bargained for but also the chance to face their personal ghosts head on... for better or worse.
TUG OF WAR
Tanzanian director Amil Shivji tells a moving story of young love set against the tumultuous backdrop of the anti-colonial struggle in Zanzibar in this lushly evocative period drama. When a young Indian-Zanzibari woman meets a handsome independence fighter and fisherman the passions of love and revolution are stirred, setting them on a treacherous path that will change their lives and the political future of their country.
DOCUMENTARIES
NO U-TURN
Nollywood director Ike Nnaebue makes his documentary debut with this personal film that examines his own migration journey to Europe taken two decades ago. It's done through the stories and lives of those who continue to make the same trip and their motivation for continuing to put their lives at risk in the hopes of finding greener pastures.
N-ICE CELLO
The incredible, strange but true story of American sculptor Tim Linhart (who carved a cello made from the ice of a glacier in the Alps) and his musical collaborator Giovanni Sollima who used the cello to play a series of performances across Italy.
TAAMADEN
Malian director Seydou Cissé examines the lesser explored world of spirituality and religion in the lives of migrants through the story of a group of young men making their way from Mali to Italy.
These men take with them traditions and folklore that are an essential component that ensures their survival and keeps connections to their homeland alive during their perilous sea crossing.
THE WIND BLOWS THE BORDER
Winner of a Special Jury Prize at the Hot Docs Festival, Laura Faerman and Marina Weis’ documentary focuses on the tensions that erupt in the border region between Brazil and Paraguay over the expansion of agribusiness.
As a Bolsonaro-supporting, anti-indigenous lawyer faces off against fiercely righteous indigenous activists the stage is set for a nasty clash that highlights the battle for many people in the Amazon region to maintain their heritage and traditions in the face of increasingly swiftly encroaching capitalism.
BLACK MAMBAS
German director Lena Karbe takes a subtle but hard-hitting look at the lives of “the black mambas,” the all-female anti-poaching unit founded in the Kruger National Park in 2013.
What should have been a celebratory tale of female empowerment turns out to be a damning indictment of colonial, racist, misogynistic attitudes that pervade the conservation industry and create the depressing situation in which the mambas have to battle so much more than only poachers simply because they are women.
