How do white South Africans deal with their fears of crime and violence? Like crocodiles, some survive without evolving, living with their fears. Others make fear their friend and evolve in ways you'd never imagine.
The first film to ever show what life was in South-Africa under the Apartheid state. The film was released as an anonymous production under the aegis of the Pan Africanist Congress in 1970.
They say that in the wild, nothing dies of old age. Yet one female baboon defies the rule. Queen of Baboons is a deeply intimate portrayal of life in a baboon troop through the eyes of its matriarch Mmasadi. From the moment of her birth, Mmasadi is destined for greatness. Born into the troops highest-ranking family, she will become queen one day.
In 1879, during the Anglo-Zulu War, man-of-the-people Lt. Chard and snooty Lt. Bromhead are in charge of defending the isolated and vastly outnumbered Natal outpost of Rorke's Drift from tribal hordes.
At the height of the cold war a struggle broke out between Governments from all over the world as to which position to take about the system of apartheid in South Africa. Leading the fight was Olof Palmes' Swedish Government, which covertly funneled over US$ 1 billion to the resistance movement. This money was given without the knowledge of either the Parliament or the Swedish populace. At the center of the net in South Africa was a Swedish diplomat called Birgitta Karlström Dorph. Meanwhile at the UN the Swedes with their Scandinavian counterparts attempted to win the argument for economic sanctions. This led to bitter arguments which saw Palme leading the fight against the Reagan and Thatcher administrations.
The true story of a white South African racist whose life was profoundly altered by the black prisoner he guarded for twenty years. The prisoner's name was Nelson Mandela.
While her husband served a life sentence, paradoxically kept safe and morally uncontaminated, Winnie Mandela rode the raw violence of apartheid, fighting on the front line and underground. This is the untold story of the mysterious forces that combined to take her down, labeling him a saint, her, a sinner.
In a remote stretch of Patagonia, Argentina, there is a family - the Dickasons - who speak a language from a country 7,000km to the east. They are part of a 114-year-old Afrikaans Boer community - South Africans of Dutch descent who sailed across the ocean to South America after the destruction of a war with the British. Today, less than 50 still speak the language and they struggle to keep their culture alive. Patriarch "Ty" Dickason, 82, is a cowboy who has never flown in a plane - and yet he yearns to one day visit the country of his blood before he and his compatriots pass away. This multiple SAFTA award-winning documentary is a portrait of the last days of the community - a parallel world where Afrikaans was never linked to Apartheid - and one family's journey to reconnect with South Africa.
The Man Who Fell From The Sky is a Channel 4 documentary. It tells the fascinating story of two men who stowed away on a flight from South Africa to the UK in 2012. But what was their story, and what happened to the two men? The documentary is billed as a ‘stranger than fiction’ story, that features two men who made the ‘most extreme journey’ ever taken by humans. South Africans Themba Cabeka and Carlito Vale made the trip clinging onto the undercarriage of the plane. Together, they made the 11-hour, 5,639-miles trip braving -60C temperatures. The incredible journey made news around the world.
During the Boer War, three Australian lieutenants are on trial for shooting Boer prisoners. Though they acted under orders, they are being used as scapegoats by the General Staff, who hopes to distance themselves from the irregular practices of the war. The trial does not progress as smoothly as expected by the General Staff, as the defence puts up a strong fight in the courtroom.
Sexy supermodels Tyra Banks, Valeria Mazza, Kathy Ireland, Stacey Williams, Ingrid Seynhaeve, Rebecca Romijn, Angie Everhart, Manon von Gerkan and newcomer Georgianna Robertson hit South Africa for the 1996 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.
What would your family reminiscences about dad sound like if he had been an early supporter of Hitler’s, a leader of the notorious SA and the Third Reich’s minister in charge of Slovakia, including its Final Solution? Executed as a war criminal in 1947, Hanns Ludin left behind a grieving widow and six young children, the youngest of whom became a filmmaker. It's a fascinating, maddening, sometimes even humorous look at what the director calls "a typical German story." (Film Forum)
The struggle to eradicate apartheid in South Africa has been chronicled over time, but no one has addressed the vital role music plays in this challenge. This documentary by Lee Hirsch recounts a fascinating and little-known part of South Africa's political history through archival footage, interviews and, of course, several mesmerizing musical performances.
She is a 13-foot, 70-pound snake that combines size and strength with a strike faster than the blink of an eye. Meet Squeeze, an eight-year-old African rock python who's capable of hunting in any terrain at any time of day for virtually any prey. As a new mother, her single goal is to incubate her young and keep them from becoming someone else's dinner. Follow her as she discovers that motherhood in the cold-blooded world of the South African savannah is no walk in the park.
Breaking and entering, gang fights-it's not the lifestyle you would imagine inside the posh Mount Edgecombe Estate in Durban, South Africa. But for our primate cousins, the vervet monkey, just trying to protect their turf is all in a day's work. This group of mischievous vervet monkeys bring action and drama to every street corner. Over the course of a year, two rival gangs, the Pani Troop and the Sugar Cane Gang, will vie for prime real estate. See who will win.
In Capetown, South Africa, in September 1966, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, was stabbed to death in Parliament. The course of South African history was changed by the assassin, Dimitri Tsafendas, who was written off as mad and condemned to twenty-eight years of imprisonment. A Question of Madness tells the extraordinary human story of a man, born of a black mother, but classified white, who travelled the world in hopeless search of sanctuary - eventually returning to the land of apartheid to wreak vengeance on the one who symbolized the racism which had haunted his life.
Directed by Ingrid Martens, this documentary takes place completely within the lifts of Ponte tower in Johannesburg. Over five years, Ingrid films the tenants of the tower and the snippets of their lives that are captured within their rides between floors.
In a meditation on the meaning behind sports in a Post-Apartheid South Africa, three young girls muse on their hopes and dreams as aspiring Drum Majorettes.
A provocative look from within at Afrikaner extremists who, in 1991, clung to the belief that they were the chosen ‘super race’ of Africa. With the demise of white rule, many of these Boers lived in fear. Some had banded into paramilitary groups, such as Eugene Terre’Blanche’s Afrikaner Resistance Movement, which claimed wide support within the South African army and police. They were preparing for an armed showdown with the new government.
‘Future Sounds of Mzansi’ is a documentary, which aims to explore, express, and interrogate South Africa’s cultural landscape. A chief vehicle of this exploration is electronic music, a staple of South African popular culture. The film explores the past, present and future of the scene and its multiple sub-genres, presented through the eyes of internationally acclaimed artist Spoek Mathambo.