DIFF short reviews

Burning

Korean director Lee Chang-dong’s acclaimed 2018 drama tells a small but carefully unravelling story of economic inequality in modern South Korea, based on a short story by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. When a young, aspirant writer bumps into an old childhood friend he's beguiled by her and convinced to housesit her cat while she’s on a trip to Africa. Upon her return he’s introduced to her mysterious and enigmatic rich friend Ben (Steven Yeun) who has a peculiar and unsettling hobby that changes everything and sets the film down a dark, thrilling and eerie path. Showing as part of a retrospective of the work of Chang-dong at this year’s festival in partnership with the Korean Cultural Centre in South Africa.

The Home

Jessie Zinn’s observational documentary follows the residents and workers at a Jewish old-age home in Cape Town where a group of lively, outspoken residents engage in the daily dramas of life in the facility. Those who care for them face their own struggles in a film that’s a humorous, moving testament to the vitality of its subjects and the realities of life in a vastly economically divided society.

Black Burns Fast

Director Sandulela Asanda’s coming-of-age drama is a queer positive love story set in the world of an elite boarding school. Luthando, 17, is a committed academic star, set for big things until the arrival of Ayanda, who changes her life and challenges her notions of who she is and what she wants, setting her on a collision course with her family and the social expectations of her schoolmates.

The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos

Modernity and African mythology combine in this magic realist drama from Nigeria’s The Agbajowa Collective. When Jawu, a young mother scraping by in one of Lagos’s floating slums, discovers a pile of corrupt blood money she’s placed in a position where she must use it to defend her community from greedy, corrupt officials intent on evicting people from their ancestral homes.

Of Mud and Blood

Jean-Gabriel Leynaud trains his lens on the small village of Numbi deep in the mountains of the Democratic Republic of Congo in this documentary, which explores the struggles of miners who dig up the “grey gold” of coltan, a vital component of the electronic devices that make our digital world spin. The mining of coltan and its distribution by channels legal and illegal has for decades wreaked unreported havoc on the social fabric of Nimbi, where bodies lie buried in the mud, everyone has blood on their hands and desperately struggling miners keep believing that the grey gold will be their ticket to untold riches and escape from the inequities of Numbi.

Street Trash

Ryan Kruger directs this sort of sequel to the 1987 American cult horror classic Street Trash which relocates the action to Cape Town in the year 2050. Global turmoil has destroyed the middle class and society is now divided between the uber-rich and the unhoused. When a group of eccentric homeless misfits uncover a diabolical plot to exterminate every homeless person in the city, they must work together to save themselves and their community from an evil mayor and the deadly body melting chemical he aims to use against them.