"When I attended film school, it dawned on me and my fellow students that the key to a successful pitch lay in addressing the salient issues of distribution," writes lawyer and film aficionado Charl Groenewald in the introduction to his book <i>The Laws of Movie-Making</i>.
The forthcoming book, <i>Marginal Lives and Painful Pasts: SA Cinema of Apartheid</i>, edited by Martin Botha, a collaboration between Genugtig! Uitgewers and the University of Cape Town’s new African Cinema Unit, is one of the first to explore an overview of local cinema in the new South Africa.
The national education department has identified district offices as key instruments in its pursuit of improving the quality of education, said Palesa Tyobeka, deputy director general for general education and training.
Zimbabwean teachers are leaving home in droves. Low salaries and poor working conditions have made life unbearable for them. It is estimated that since last year almost every school in the country has lost at least three to four teachers.
There are a few special places that, no matter how many times you visit them, always stir the senses, refresh the soul and banish the stresses and strains of everyday life. For me, Mpumalanga’s Blyde River Canyon is one of these places.
Portia’s story: Patience in our lives by Dawn Baaba Arthur.
A few years ago if you had seen Leon Schuster’s Mr Bones you would have watched one of the highest grossing and, dare it be said, best films South Africa had to offer. Thankfully the same can’t be said of our industry’s current output with the advent of films such as Bunny Chow and Tsotsi.
Globalisation is reducing diversity to a minimum of conservative, standardised products: homogenised, predigested, regurgitated, slickly packaged goods for universal, easy, unthinking consumption. That’s happening all over the world. But closer to home, and to our hearts, is the problem that there is less space for African filmmakers to be seen or heard.
Al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, on Tuesday threatened more attacks on Britain two weeks after failed bombings in London and Glasgow. ”I say to [former British prime minister Tony] Blair’s successor that the policy of your predecessor drew catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq,” he said in a tape posted on a website.
Forensic experts exhumed a baby on Tuesday who was drowned and buried in a yard — allegedly by her mother — last year, Pretoria police said. ”I can confirm that forensic experts found the remains of the child in the yard,” Inspector Paul Ramaloko said. He said the child was buried in July last year just after being born.