Dir: Eddie Edwards
Year: 2011
Dur: 28 min
South Africa
English and Xhosa with English subtitles

Talented, charismatic, vivacious, yet troubled, Brenda Fassie is a national icon that symbolised so much for so many in South Africa. In 2004, just before she died, Fassie spent a day in Cape Town with filmmaker Eddie Edwards. The footage reveals much about Fassie’s state of mind in her last months. Fassie returns to her childhood home in Langa, visits her parent’s graves, works the fans wherever she goes – at the local shebeen and a chemist – and gives a sensational impromptu performance on Obs’ Lower Main Road. Interspersed among these vital snapshots are Fassie’s take on family, love and celebrity and, prophetically, her death.
Filmmaker in attendance

Difficult Love is a personal portrait of Zanele Muholi, the pho- tographer involved in the controversy in August 2009 in which the Minister of Arts and Culture, Lulu Xingwana walked out of an exhibition featuring her work, claiming it was ‘immoral and offensive’. This film is an account of Muholi’s experience as a black lesbian growing up in the Durban township, Umlazi, covering her relationship with her mother who passed away. The film is an intimate account of the women that have shaped and made pos- sible Muholi’s work as a photographer as she has chronicled and continues to chronicle the life and struggles of the gay and lesbian community in South Africa, and particularly black lesbians.
Filmmaker in attendance

From the inner city slums of Bariga in Lagos, Adefila and an unlikely band of street performers create a guerilla theatre of inspiring music and dance drama with themes that parody the sensitive contradictions of the politics and government of Nigeria. The documentary chronicles the artistic development of Segun Adefila and his Crown troupe’s emergence as the most sought-after dance drama theatre in Nigeria, appreciated for their thought-provoking approach to their art as a mirror of their environment and a tool for social change. Featuring landmark music and dance performances and incisive com- mentaries from leading Nigerian culture personalities such as Ahmed Yerima, Francesca Emmanuel, Duro Oni, Tunde Kelani and Jahman Anikulapo, Bariga Boy is a gripping experience of how one artist’s creative consciousness is fired by the urban ghetto experience.
Filmmaker in attendance

Aurukun is a tough Aboriginal community in Queensland, Australia with a long history of trauma and dysfunction that lives on in its community school which has the worst academic record in the state. Voices from the Cape documents an exciting, confrontational approach re-engaging young people with the school system and getting them to assert their voices and raise their own expectations. Filmmaker and human rights law- yer David Vadiveloo heads a team of media trainers who equip the young students with digital media and guide them through the production of their own short films. What transpires is confronting, frustrating and emotionally raw.
Filmmaker in attendance

Dir: Ramadan Suleman
Year: 2009
Dur: 112 min
South Africa

South African visual artist, Dumile Feni, was forced into exile in 1968 leaving behind his pregnant wife. Unable to return home and disconnected from his past, he led an erratic life as an artist in England and then the U.S. for 23 years amongst a small group of exiles, sympathisers and musicians. He never returned home. Ten years after Feni’s death, filmmaker Ramadan Suleman follows the artist’s wife and the daughter he never knew on a journey across three countries, as they search for answers to decades of questions and try to build an accurate picture of him with only the fragmented memories of his friends and the profound and enigmatic work he created.
Filmmaker in attendance

If you take a pinch of Khoi-San lament, a dash of Malay spice, a bold measure of European orchestral, a splash of Xhosa spiritual, a clash of marching bands, a riff of rock, the pizzazz of the Klopse, some driving primal beat, and a lot of humour and musical virtuos- ity, what do you get? Goema Goema Goema! Weaving together the ancient, the traditional, and the classical into the contemporary universal sound of Cape Town, Mac MacKenzie, musical master- mind and founder of The Genuines and The Goema Captains of Cape Town, puts together the final touches to the culmination of his life’s work: Goema in Five Movements. Musicians and musi- cal commentators Hilton Schilder, Neo Muyanga, Iain Harris and Graham Arendse, and new kids on the block, Kyle Shepherd and Shane Cooper, add a contemporary context to Goema, while the orchestra rehearses for its premiere performance at the SABC studios.
Filmmaker in attendance