Flatland Review: A Flat Attempt

Tshiamo Malatji Television 2021-02-04 07:49:44

The film follows three women. Beauty Cuba (Faith Baloyi) is a police captain trying to clear her lover’s name from a crime she suspects he did not commit. Natalie Jonkers (Nicole Fortuin) reprises an uncertain newly-wed who runs away with her reckless friend, Poppie van Niekerk (Izel Bezuidenhout). Sometimes, the story is coherent. But often, it feels forcefully dramatic and uncomfortably disjointed.

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Hauntology & The Ghosts It Gathers

Tshiamo Malatji Culture 2021-02-04 07:49:44

Life, especially Black life, is haunted. We are terrorised by constant persecution, the memories of our pasts and the anxieties of our future. There are many unsolved crimes, lost histories and sites where atrocities which once occurred can no longer clearly be seen -- “non-sites of memory”. We must recognise and address these phantoms. This is where the wisdom of, Ghosts, Spectres, Revenants: Hauntology as a Means to Think and Feel Future is helpful.

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Review – Women Hold Up The Sky

Tshiamo Malatji Television 2021-02-04 07:49:44

“If they come to evict us again, we will die until the last person standing” proclaims a woman in Uganda. Her village has been raided before. Homes and crops were burned down. People were chased away with fire and ammunition. Women were physically and sexually assaulted.

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Capitalism Makes Blackness Eat Itself

Tshiamo Malatji Television 2021-02-04 07:49:44

Racial capitalism does not need all Black people to work. In fact, it requires that there always be a large supply of unemployed which pressures the people who are employed to accept low wages and poor working conditions else they will be replaced.

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The Bisho Massacre: Violence from Nowhere

Tshiamo Malatji Television 2021-02-04 07:49:44

We can appreciate the power of a documentary to express the truth, but this film falls short in explaining the condition of Blackness during South Africa’s tumultuous transition to democracy. A focus on the factual accounts of violence, backed up by archival material and interviews from primary sources, is helpful. But overall, it fails in the same area as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

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African Art is Immersion & Struggle

Tshiamo Malatji Television 2021-02-04 07:49:44

African art can be considered a deep search. The film introduces “immersive art” as a descriptive term but acknowledges that categorising African art is not always possible due to how linked our creations are to our identity and suffering.

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Black America is King

Tshiamo Malatji Television 2021-02-04 07:49:44

In itself, there is nothing unsuitable with Black America collaborating with African artists to produce commercial products, as is the case with Beyonce’s Black is King, but we must be under no illusion that Black is King is still very much Beyonce’s.

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Blood & Diamonds: The Exploitation of Africa in Cinema

Tshiamo Malatji Television 2021-02-04 07:49:44

Western films set in Africa are not African films. They make no attempt to represent authentic African stories, are created primarily for Western audiences and in the worst of ways, exploit Africa. Africans can do very little to prevent or alter these films because the economic capital they bring to the region is greater than there being no film at all.

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