CINEMA: Justin Pearce IN Grief, a television production company occupies offices that used to house a brothel, and, as their producer remarks, it’s now a different kind of prostitution that goes on there. Making low-budget daytime television is prostitution in more than one sense though, as much about the displaced gratification of desire as about […]

Rowan Callaghan THE Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF), which has helped over half-a-million people and paid out over R1-billion so far this year, is to begin improving its service immediately. The steps are the first in a range of changes it will introduce to improve its public image. The Department of Labour reports that so far […]

Funds destined for community cultural groups have been redirected back to the performing arts councils. HAZEL FRIEDMAN reports on the ensuing fracas CULTURAL war is being waged over cuts in provincial funding promised to community cultural structures by the Ministry of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology. The battlelines have been drawn between the Gauteng-based Arts […]

Worldwide African Investment Holdings has withdrawn its Free-to-Air shareholding to pursue satellite interests, writes Niel Bierbaum WISEMAN NKUHLU’S Worldwide African Investment Holdings has given notice that it intends to withdraw as a shareholder from Quentin Green’s Free-to-Air consortium. According to spokesman Joe Makobe, WWAIH intends to pursue direct-to-home satellite opportunities “rather than waiting for terrestrial […]

Sol Kerzner has severed his links with his South African business just as a police investigation into alleged corruption draws to a close. Louise Flanagan reports UNTOUCHABLE Sun King Sol Kerzner withdrew from his South African company this week as an eight-year-long criminal investigation into allegations of corruption against him drew to a close. Kerzner […]

OPERA: Coenraad Visser AS one has come to expect, the Italian Opera Gala presented by the Roodepoort City Opera is something of a curate’s egg. But the good parts are quite simply stunning. Excerpts from eight Italian operas are presented on an open stage, without the aid of props or costumes. But with imaginative direction […]

THERE was a sense of deja vu as South Africa’s most litigated public servant, Winnie Mandela, failed to testify in her own defence this week. Mandela has frequently been unavailable when called on to face the consequences of legal proceedings. l President Nelson Mandela resorted to a supreme court order to serve a divorce summons […]

FINE ART: Hazel Friedman ASK anyone who knows anything about Trevor Makhoba’s art where his best paintings can be found, and you’ll be told to look not in the myriad institutions and public collections that house his work, but in the township of Umlazi. It was here, before this area of KwaZulu-Natal became one of […]