Morgan Freeman plays Nelson Mandella as the newly-elected President of South Africa in Invictus (2009), Clint Eastwood’s reverent tribute to Nelson Mandella’s efforts to unite post-apartheid South Africa. This isn’t a biography of Mandella. Audiences come to the film with the understanding that Nelson Mandella spent 24 years in prison for protesting South Africa’s apartheid […]
The aliens arrived almost thirty years ago, their crippled spacecraft hovering to a halt over Johannesburg, where it remains floating over the city. That defining image hovers over the entirety of District 9 (2009), a savagely whipsmart satire of first contact with an alien species that has been reduced to repressed immigrant population stranded in […]
Set in the Xhosa community in rural South Africa, The Wound (Inxeba) (South Africa, 2017) is a fictional drama about a real-life ritual from tribal culture that is still practiced by some members of the community in modern times. The Ukwaluka is a rite of manhood for young male teens, the “initiates” of the ceremony […]
