The new movie by “Tsotsi” director Gavin Hood opens in South Africa and the United States on Friday, and not only brings him back to Africa but it looks like it’s going to be a blockbuster and rank him with the world’s top action and suspense directors. “Eye in the Sky” has a brilliant cast – Helen […]

The tragic and redemptive story of Amy Biehl, the American Fulbright scholar who was living in South Africa when she was attacked by a township mob in Cape Town and stabbed to death, will be made into a film backed by Tyler Perry and some other US movie luminaries. According to news reports on Thursday, the movie, titled […]

As predicted, South African-born and raised Margaret Sixel won the Best Film Editing Oscar on Monday evening for ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’. This was the first Academy Award nomination – and (obviously) win – for Sixel, who studied film editing in Australia, and now lives in Sydney with her husband of over 21 years, George Miller… who happens to […]

If the Los Angeles Times has its way, South African-born Margaret Sixel will win the Academy Award tonight for her brilliant editing of the Charlize Theron movie “Mad Max: Fury Road”, Sixel’s first action pic. “Margaret Sixel’s Herculean effort cutting together the massive amount of footage shot by her husband, George Miller, is the favorite,” […]

So many people replied to our story “12 of SA’s Best Movies You Might Have Missed” – especially “Dirkie”, which triggered many a childhood memory – we thought we’d add some of the most popular suggestions that didn’t make it onto the first list. 1. e’Lollipop (aka Forever Young, Forever Free) (1975) A black South African boy […]

We all know about “Tsotsi”, which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, and Leon Schuster’s blockbusters that people might titters at but go see anyway. We also know those movies about South Africa with foreigners trying to pass off as locals (“Cry Freedom”, “Long Road to Freedom”). But here are 12 little screen gems born and bred […]

For anyone who loves animated movies like “Finding Nemo” or “Wallace and Gromit”, Cape Town is the place to be for the next four days as the Cape Town International Animation Festival offers a glut of movies and talks and workshops from around the world. Included in the features available will be the highly praised […]

A UK-based production company has announced that it will begin filming a documentary about the circumstances leading to the murder of Reeva Steenkamp by Oscar Pistorius. The shooting of Steenkamp through the locked bathroom door of Pistorius’ house took place on 14 February three years ago, and Pistorius later claimed he thought he was shooting an intruder. […]

The latest Vanity Fair cover is an annual event where the most talked-about stars in movies grace the cover, and one of them is Gugu Mbatha-Raw, whose father is South African and whose name is actually short for Gugulethu. Mbatha-Raw was born in Witney, a rural and typically quaint Oxfordshire town, of a South African doctor […]

If you are upset that South Africa’s Charlize Theron didn’t get nominated by the Academy Awards for her brilliant performance in ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’, that’s nothing compared to the racial furore that’s been caused by people of colour having been overlooked, with two well-known movie industry members saying they won’t attend the 2016 Oscar awards in […]

The successful U.S. streaming entertainment company Netflix has broadened its global outreach to South Africa, where it launched this week and goes up against local streaming company ShowMax, which began in 2015. South Africa is one of 130 countries that will get Netflix from Wednesday. The latest move means that Netflix is now available in […]

The singer Beyoncé wants to make a movie playing Saartjie Baartman, the Khoi woman who was sent to Europe in the 19th century and spent the rest of her short life as an oddity gawked at by Europeans, according to news reports. The Grammy winner who has acted in movies like “Dreamgirls” has apparently requested countless books on […]

The movie studio dubbed South Africa’s Pixar, which made the international hits “Adventures in Zambezia” and “Khumba”, will back eight new animated movies and TV series – two more than initially intended – because the proposals it got were so good. The projects include a story about a lemming who must learn to defy his nature […]

The seaside town of Hermanus became a movie set this week with the filming of “The Whale Caller”. Based on the acclaimed book of the same title by Zakes Mda and adapted for the screen by Zola Maseko, the story is about a kelp-horn-blowing man who seems to be deeply drawn to a very particular whale. […]

Thanksgiving is a very big time in the US, when people do anything to get home to the family and turkey dinner. This year National Geographic’s biggest scripted series ever tells the story of the first Thanksgiving, when British settlers on the Mayflower landed at Cape Cod in 1620, except it was all shot near another Cape – Cape Town. “Saints & […]

Watch a foreign movie when you know it’s made in South Africa – but is meant to be somewhere else – and you can’t help looking for those telltale signs, places you recognise. It’s supposed to be Los Angeles or somewhere in the middle of America, but you know it’s the Atlantic Seaboard in Cape Town […]

One scene in Soft Vengeance will always stay with me: Two men sit in a TV studio for BBC’s Hard Talk. One is a British journalist, the other a smiling, heavily accented, one-armed man in a colourful African traditional shirt. “Is forgiveness too cheap for the kinds of crimes committed under apartheid in South Africa?” the journalist […]

South Africa plays a feature role – and it’s a good one – in the new James Bond movie, ‘Spectre’, even though South Africa will be one of the last countries in the world that actually sees a major launch of the spy extravaganza. While the movie itself – which is brilliant – flits from Mexico […]

It might be a bit late to get to Scotland by the weekend, but this trailer shows you what exactly will be going on at the Africa in Motion Film Festival. And as you can see, some pretty amazing movies are being made in Africa. Get a taste of the festival movies in this hip video https://vimeo.com/140192562 Now […]

Just in time for the worldwide release of the highly anticipated Danny Boyle movie ‘Steve Jobs’, about the Apple founder, a South African version of the trailer – with a couple of ‘bliksems’ and ‘voetseks’ thrown in – has been uploaded to YouTube. https://youtu.be/H_tnqZ_686w The movie stars Michael Fassbender as the legendary but controversial Jobs, as […]

Following the success earlier this year of ‘The Endless River’  at two major international film festivals, two new South African movies are making their marks on doing likewise. ‘For Love and Broken Bones’, directed by Tebogo Malope, and Sara Blecher’s ‘Ayanda’ – which premiered in South Africa last night – both come short on the heels of Cape Town […]

A movie set in the Johannesburg township of Alexandra, ‘Thina Sobabili’, is hoping to be nominated for the foreign movie section of the next Academy Awards. ‘Thina Sobabili’, meaning ‘The Two of Us’, is by first-time director Ernest Nkosi, according to Variety magazine. The nomination was announced on Monday by the South African Academy Awards selection committee […]

Viola Davis was the biggest news of the Emmy Awards last night, becoming the first African-American to win the Award for best actress in a drama series. And this morning her name has trended in the top three on Twitter in South Africa with media celebrating her win (see below). The 50-year-old actress who studied at Juillard […]

The first official trailer from ‘The Jungle Book’ has been extremely well received around the world, including in South Africa where it is trending in the Top 10 on Twitter. Since Disney uploaded the video to YouTube yesterday, it has received over 2 million views, and is being touted as “wild”, “spectacular”, “terrifying” and “fantastic” […]

Africa’s stories are being retold in a modern format, from an African perspective, to an audience who may not know them…from the founding of Botswana by King Khama III to the bravery of Bilal Ibn Rabah and the quest of Adama in a foreign, war-torn land. African history is about to get a reboot in one […]