Craig Freimond is trying to quit smoking. He is buying his cigarettes loose, as if that helps. He can’t take the cold, but we have to sit outside on the balcony of the Wits University theatre nearby the rehearsal room of his new play. It is a toss-up between heat and smoke, appropriate since his first movie is about the downside of addiction. Matthew Krouse speaks to director Craig Freimond.
‘God forbid! White people are moving into the townships! Crime will go up! Property prices will go down!” This was the greeting Wits doctoral fellow Detlev Krige received when he announced to his companion at a drinking hole in Rockville, Soweto, that he was about to become a neighbour. A recent conference revealed the extent to which <i>ikasi</i> and metropolitan cultures have crossed over, report Sizwe samaYende and Liz McGregor.
At the first squelch, I knew the film would be ruined. Out of the corner of my eye, I had seen her unwrap the gum, pop the wad in her mouth and masticate it experimentally. But worse was to come. The stranger sitting next to me, at the screening of the meticulously restored print of the 1970s kung-fu classic, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, was a talker. Simon Busch talks cinema etiquette.
”Gone, by implication, are the days of slavery, colonialism and imperial arrogance. Gone is the world of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. We live in a new age of enlightenment. Or so it seems, until you start listening to where the dialogue is heading”. John Matshikiza takes a look at new theatre production Blue/Orange.
When the guns went silent in Aitta Shaab, a war-ravaged village close to the Israeli border, three children skipped through the rubble looking for a little fun. Hurdling over lumps of crushed concrete and dodging spikes of twisted metal, Sukna, Hassan and Merwa, aged 10 to 12, paused before a curious object. Sukna picked it up.
Satellite navigation (satnav) systems may be the latest ”must have” car gadgets but London’s cab drivers, who have to pass the world’s toughest taxi exam, are not impressed. While hundreds of thousands of the high-tech guidance systems are sold in Britain every year most cabbies in London prefer to rely on their own brain power.
It is known as Denglisch, a hybrid of Deutsch and English, and cultural purists say it is an insult to the language of Goethe and should be purged from the vocabulary. Denglisch has spread steadily as Germans adopted United States phrases in business, advertising, technology, and everyday speech.
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Dutch police arrested 12 passengers on a United States Northwest Airlines plane bound for India that was forced to turn back to Amsterdam’s Schipol airport on Wednesday, media reported. The report quoted a police spokesperson as saying 12 were arrested, but declined to give further details due to the ongoing investigation.
Islamists controlling much of southern Somalia on Wednesday reopened the capital’s main seaport that was closed 11 years ago at the height of unrest and chaos in the lawless nation. In their latest move to assert authority and restore order to Mogadishu, the Islamists declared the Indian Ocean port open for business.