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A Lion's Trail
Directed by François Verster • Documentary • 2002 • 54 minutes
It will take anyone in the world no more than a few bars to recognize this song: "The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, also sung as "Wimoweh”.
The melody has been covered at least two hundred times by artists as diverse as James Last, Henri Sa...
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Love the One You Love
Directed by Jenna Bass • Drama • With Chi Mhende, Andile Nebulane, Louw Venter • 2015 • 88 minutes
Across the city of Cape Town, a sex-line operator, a dog handler, a love-sick IT-technician and a lonely teenager begin to suspect that their romantic relationships are the subject of a bizarre co...
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Shirley Adams
Directed by Oliver Hermanus • Drama • With Denise Newman, Keenan Arrison • 2009 • 91 minutes
Shirley Adams spends her days caring for her disabled son, Donovan - he was shot in the back of the neck on his way home from school one afternoon over a year ago.
Since then the Adams family has lost al... -
Come Back, Africa
Directed by Lionel Rogosin • Drama • With Zacharia Mgabi, Vinah Bendile, Miriam Makeba • 1959 • 86 minutes
Lionel Rogosin’s 1959 powerful classic Come Back, Africa is one of the bravest and best of all political films. After witnessing firsthand the terrors of fascism as a soldier in World War I...
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An American in Sophiatown: The Making of Come Back, Africa
Directed by Lloyd Ross • Documentary • 2007 • 52 minutes
An American in Sophiatown puts Come Back, Africa into the context of the time it was made ( 1957-1958) - recreating the sense of danger, the intrigues which were necessary to make the film under the nose of the apartheid regime. We come to...
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Last Grave at Dimbaza
Directed by Chris Curling and Pascoe Macfarlane • Documentary • 1974 • 55 minutes
In 1969, a small group of South African exiles and British film students formed Morena Films in London to produce films about apartheid. By 1974, they produced one of the first, and certainly the most influential, ...
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Dying for Gold
Directed by Catherine Meyburgh & Richard Pakleppa • Documentary • 2019 • 98 minutes
In the biggest class action law suit the country had ever seen, South Africa’s largest gold mining companies were accused of knowingly exposing miners to deadly dust and disease.
Now, harrowing underground foota...
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Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You.
Directed by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese • Documentary • 2021 • 76 minutes
As we float through the streets of Lesotho, following a cross-bearing woman and an omnipresent figure wearing wings, a tumultuous history of sorrow and suffering between the motherland and its people unravels. The through lin...
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Miners Shot Down
Directed by Rehad Desai • Documentary • 2014 • 86 minutes
In August 2012, mine workers in one of South Africa's biggest platinum mines began a wildcat strike for better wages. Six days into the strike, the police used live ammunition to brutally suppress it, killing 34 and injuring many more. Th...
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The Giant Is Falling
Directed by Rehad Desai and Jabulani Mzozo • Documentary • 2016 • 77 minutes
The loyalty people have for the party of liberation operates at a deep psychological level. But in recent years, the ANC's popularity is at an all time low, not least amongst people who were once its most loyal supporte...
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Everything Must Fall
Directed by Rehad Desai • Documentary • 2018 • 85 minutes
Can a diverse group of college kids find common ground with their school’s faculty and janitorial staff to bring the school administration to its knees? Can they banish a nation’s crippling student debt, guarantee workers benefits and liv...
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How to Steal a Country
Directed by Rehad Desai, co-directed by Mark Kaplan • Documentary • 2020 • 87 minutes
[02/05/2025: Anyone see the NYT article today "What Is ‘State Capture’? A Warning for Americans." ? Here's a doc thriller about what went on in South Africa not so long ago!]
HOW TO STEAL A COUNTRY opens like ...
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Time of Pandemics
Directed by Rehad Desai • Documentary • 2023 • 87 minutes
By the time COVID-19 appeared, South African filmmaker Rehad Desai was all-too-familiar with pandemics. Not only had he previously worked in HIV prevention, he was also in the midst of making a film about a clinical trial for a vaccine th...
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Forgotten World
Directed by Terri Ella • Documentary • 2015 • 52 minutes
Snaking north through eastern South Africa, the Mpumalanga Escarpment is dotted by mysterious stone structures-stone-lined roads, terraces, and the nested circular patterns-left behind by a now-vanished civilization.
FORGOTTEN WORLD featu...
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Between Joyce and Remembrance
Directed by Mark J. Kaplan • Documentary • 2005 • 68 minutes
BETWEEN JOYCE AND REMEMBRANCE is a hard-hitting documentary about truth and reconciliation in South Africa, focusing on the family of the tortured, poisoned and murdered student activist, Siphiwo Mtimkulu.
Producer Mark Kaplan spent s...
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Rough Aunties
Directed by Kim Longinotto • Documentary • 2009 • 103 minutes
Fearless, feisty and resolute, the “Rough Aunties” are a remarkable group of women unwavering in their stand to protect and care for the abused, neglected and forgotten children of Durban, South Africa. This documentary by internation...
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Ordinary People: The Peacemakers
Directed by Clifford Bestall • Produced by Harriet Gavshon • Documentary • 1993 • 26 minutes
During the fraught transition period to democracy in South Africa, the first episode of ORDINARY PEOPLE filmed two competing rallies held in Vosloorus township to commemorate the Sharpeville massacre of ...
