Hey Austin! Did you miss the Fantastic Fest Premiere or opening weekend of Dredd 3D? We don't "judge", but Smells Like Screen Spirit & Lionsgate invite you to redeem yourself by entering our contest for five lucky Austinites to win free passes for you and a guest to see Dredd 3D! Director: Pete Travis Screenplay: Alex Garland Created by: John Wagner & Carlos Ezquerra Starring: Karl Urban (Judge Dredd), Olivia Thirlby (Anderson), Lena Headey (Ma-Ma), Wood Harris (Kay), Langley Kirkwood (Judge Lex), Junior Singo (Amos), Luke Tyler (Freel), Jason Cope (Zwirner), Domnhall Gleeson (Clan Techie), Warrick Grier (Caleb) Synopsis: The future America is an irradiated waste land. On its East Coast, running from Boston to Washington DC, lies Mega City One- a vast, violent metropolis where criminals rule the chaotic streets. The only force of order lies with the urban cops called “Judges” who possess the combined powers of judge, jury and instant executioner.
- 9/26/2012
- by Dave Campbell
- SmellsLikeScreenSpirit
News on the march…! Held over the weekend, in Yenegoa, Bayelsa State (Nigeria) on Saturday, March 26, 2011, the celebration announcing the winners of the 2011 African Movie Academy Awards (Amaa) – in just its 7th year.
This year’s nominations list boasted an even longer list of awards, compared to previous years, as the award ceremony continues to grow.
Viva Riva, a film I’ve touted on this website in recent days, after seeing it for the first time last week, rightfully dominated, winning 6 trophies, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Cinematography, and Best Production Design.
The rest of the story follows in the table below, lifted from the Amaa’s website Here:
Category
Nominated Films
Winners
Best Short Film Bougfen – Petra Baninla Sunjo (Cameroun)
Weakness – Wanjiru Kairu (Kenya)
No Jersey No Match – Daniel Ademinokan (Nigeria)
Duty – Mak Kusare (Nigeria)
Bomlambo – Zwelesizwe Ntuli (South Africa)
Zebu And...
This year’s nominations list boasted an even longer list of awards, compared to previous years, as the award ceremony continues to grow.
Viva Riva, a film I’ve touted on this website in recent days, after seeing it for the first time last week, rightfully dominated, winning 6 trophies, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Cinematography, and Best Production Design.
The rest of the story follows in the table below, lifted from the Amaa’s website Here:
Category
Nominated Films
Winners
Best Short Film Bougfen – Petra Baninla Sunjo (Cameroun)
Weakness – Wanjiru Kairu (Kenya)
No Jersey No Match – Daniel Ademinokan (Nigeria)
Duty – Mak Kusare (Nigeria)
Bomlambo – Zwelesizwe Ntuli (South Africa)
Zebu And...
- 3/28/2011
- by Tambay
- ShadowAndAct
Here’s the trailer for Hopeville, a film that screened and won an “honorable mention” at the Pan African Film Festival this year.
The South African film was directed by John Trengove and stars Desmond Dube, Jody Abrahams, Jonathan Pienaar, Terry Pheto, Themba Ndaba and Junior Singo.
Film synopsis:
Hopeville tells the story of Amos, a reformed alcoholic on a mission to forge a relationship with his estranged son, Themba. When father & son arrive in the dusty town of Hopeville, they discover a mean little community where apathy, fear & suspicion are the order of the day. When Amos decides to restore the public swimming pool so that his son can pursue a swimming career, he is met with scepticism and resistance from the town’s authorities and its inhabitants. Through patience, determination and above all courage, Amos’ selfless act ripples through Hopeville, inspiring others to take action and to do what they know is right.
The South African film was directed by John Trengove and stars Desmond Dube, Jody Abrahams, Jonathan Pienaar, Terry Pheto, Themba Ndaba and Junior Singo.
Film synopsis:
Hopeville tells the story of Amos, a reformed alcoholic on a mission to forge a relationship with his estranged son, Themba. When father & son arrive in the dusty town of Hopeville, they discover a mean little community where apathy, fear & suspicion are the order of the day. When Amos decides to restore the public swimming pool so that his son can pursue a swimming career, he is met with scepticism and resistance from the town’s authorities and its inhabitants. Through patience, determination and above all courage, Amos’ selfless act ripples through Hopeville, inspiring others to take action and to do what they know is right.
- 3/27/2011
- by Cynthia
- ShadowAndAct
Over the weekend, as most of us were reveling in Academy Awards thrills and chills, the nominations for another major movie award ceremony were announced, many miles, across the Atlantic Ocean; I’m referring to the 7-year old (this year) Africa Movie Academy Awards (Amaa), which will be held in Yenegoa, Bayelsa State (Nigeria) on Saturday, March 26, 2011.
This year’s nominations list boasts an even longer list of awards, compared to previous years, as the award ceremony continues to grow.
I’ll have to thoroughly scrub this list to highlight as many titles as I can – especially in the feature film categories, and I’ll do that with individual posts over the next week, or so. In the meantime, however, I’ll quickly point out those few titles that we’ve previously given ink to on this website, that are nominated for Amaa awards, including the following: in the Best Diaspora Feature,...
This year’s nominations list boasts an even longer list of awards, compared to previous years, as the award ceremony continues to grow.
I’ll have to thoroughly scrub this list to highlight as many titles as I can – especially in the feature film categories, and I’ll do that with individual posts over the next week, or so. In the meantime, however, I’ll quickly point out those few titles that we’ve previously given ink to on this website, that are nominated for Amaa awards, including the following: in the Best Diaspora Feature,...
- 2/28/2011
- by Tambay
- ShadowAndAct
Screened
Mill Valley Film Festival
MILL VALLEY, Calif. -- South African director David Hickson's "Beat the Drum", a tale of the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, features gorgeous scenery, fantastic cinematography by Lance Gewer and an incredible array of great South African faces. At its world premiere during the Mill Valley Film Festival, audiences were enraptured, which bodes well for its potential boxoffice. The film is in Zulu and English and has the potential for greater success than just the art house circuit. But because of American screenwriter W. David McBrayer's rather banal script, the film doesn't succeed so much as art as it does as propaganda.
It's impossible to deny "Drum"'s emotional power, which is heightened even more by McBrayer's choice to focus the movie on a beatific young boy, Musa (Junior Singo). Musa lives in a Zulu village where he's been orphaned by AIDS. The villagers think his family is cursed, so Musa heads for Johannesburg to earn enough money to buy a cow for his foster grandmother and to find his uncle. He encounters Nobe (Owen Sejake), a truck driver who gives Musa a lift. In Jo'burg, as it's referred to, Musa washes car windshields on the streets, grateful when drivers flip him a few coins.
Meanwhile, Nobe argues with his wife, who wants him to wear a condom and asks if he's been promiscuous. He refuses to discuss it. (We know he's been with prostitutes.) In a third story line, Nobe's white boss, Pieter Botha (Clive Scott), owner of a distribution company, chides his lawyer son (Tom Fairfoot), who's more interested in helping out a local orphanage than in making money at his father's business. When his son is hospitalized with full-blown AIDS, Pieter begins to understand his son's life.
McBrayer is attempting something Dickensian with these multiple intertwining story lines, and you might be reminded of "Oliver Twist". But McBrayer and Hickson have no fury fueling their film
there's a curious lack of malice. The land is so picturesque and Musa is so sweet and preternaturally wise that he never seems in any real danger, despite some menacing from a street tough in Jo'burg. (Singo has an amazing face, and the audience melts when he smiles, but for all that, he has no real technique or skill as an actor.) There's no mention at all of how governmental policies contribute to the problem. (A failure of nerve?) And the film's conclusion comes off as sentimental and naive. Dickens' happy endings were hard-earned.
The AIDS deaths that occur in the movie are abstract and antiseptic. There is no sense of the appalling physical ravages of the disease: The extreme wasting, the disfiguring opportunistic diseases -- it just seems like a bad flu. (Whenever anyone coughs in this movie, we're meant to understand they have AIDS.) And the forces that encourage the spread of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa are all elucidated in the first 15 minutes of the film, so that it feels like a precis of the Time magazine cover article on the subject. This then is the movie's problem: McBrayer and Hickson have made a film about AIDS in Africa, but what they haven't done is people it with compelling, distinctive characters.
BEAT THE DRUM
Z Prods.
Credits:
Director: David Hickson
Screenwriter: W. David McBrayer
Producers: W. David McBrayer, Karen S. Shapiro, Richard Shaw
Director of photography: Lance Gewer
Production designer: Johnny Breedt
Music: Klaus Badelt, Ramin Djawadi
Costume designer: Ruy Filipe
Editor: Mark Winitsky
Cast:
Musa: Junior Singo
Thandi: Dineo Nchabeleng
Nobe: Owen Sejake
Pieter: Clive Scott
Stefan: Tom Fairfoot
Letti: Noluthando Maleka
Running time -- 114 minutes
No MPAA rating...
Mill Valley Film Festival
MILL VALLEY, Calif. -- South African director David Hickson's "Beat the Drum", a tale of the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, features gorgeous scenery, fantastic cinematography by Lance Gewer and an incredible array of great South African faces. At its world premiere during the Mill Valley Film Festival, audiences were enraptured, which bodes well for its potential boxoffice. The film is in Zulu and English and has the potential for greater success than just the art house circuit. But because of American screenwriter W. David McBrayer's rather banal script, the film doesn't succeed so much as art as it does as propaganda.
It's impossible to deny "Drum"'s emotional power, which is heightened even more by McBrayer's choice to focus the movie on a beatific young boy, Musa (Junior Singo). Musa lives in a Zulu village where he's been orphaned by AIDS. The villagers think his family is cursed, so Musa heads for Johannesburg to earn enough money to buy a cow for his foster grandmother and to find his uncle. He encounters Nobe (Owen Sejake), a truck driver who gives Musa a lift. In Jo'burg, as it's referred to, Musa washes car windshields on the streets, grateful when drivers flip him a few coins.
Meanwhile, Nobe argues with his wife, who wants him to wear a condom and asks if he's been promiscuous. He refuses to discuss it. (We know he's been with prostitutes.) In a third story line, Nobe's white boss, Pieter Botha (Clive Scott), owner of a distribution company, chides his lawyer son (Tom Fairfoot), who's more interested in helping out a local orphanage than in making money at his father's business. When his son is hospitalized with full-blown AIDS, Pieter begins to understand his son's life.
McBrayer is attempting something Dickensian with these multiple intertwining story lines, and you might be reminded of "Oliver Twist". But McBrayer and Hickson have no fury fueling their film
there's a curious lack of malice. The land is so picturesque and Musa is so sweet and preternaturally wise that he never seems in any real danger, despite some menacing from a street tough in Jo'burg. (Singo has an amazing face, and the audience melts when he smiles, but for all that, he has no real technique or skill as an actor.) There's no mention at all of how governmental policies contribute to the problem. (A failure of nerve?) And the film's conclusion comes off as sentimental and naive. Dickens' happy endings were hard-earned.
The AIDS deaths that occur in the movie are abstract and antiseptic. There is no sense of the appalling physical ravages of the disease: The extreme wasting, the disfiguring opportunistic diseases -- it just seems like a bad flu. (Whenever anyone coughs in this movie, we're meant to understand they have AIDS.) And the forces that encourage the spread of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa are all elucidated in the first 15 minutes of the film, so that it feels like a precis of the Time magazine cover article on the subject. This then is the movie's problem: McBrayer and Hickson have made a film about AIDS in Africa, but what they haven't done is people it with compelling, distinctive characters.
BEAT THE DRUM
Z Prods.
Credits:
Director: David Hickson
Screenwriter: W. David McBrayer
Producers: W. David McBrayer, Karen S. Shapiro, Richard Shaw
Director of photography: Lance Gewer
Production designer: Johnny Breedt
Music: Klaus Badelt, Ramin Djawadi
Costume designer: Ruy Filipe
Editor: Mark Winitsky
Cast:
Musa: Junior Singo
Thandi: Dineo Nchabeleng
Nobe: Owen Sejake
Pieter: Clive Scott
Stefan: Tom Fairfoot
Letti: Noluthando Maleka
Running time -- 114 minutes
No MPAA rating...
Screened
Mill Valley Film Festival
MILL VALLEY, Calif. -- South African director David Hickson's "Beat the Drum", a tale of the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, features gorgeous scenery, fantastic cinematography by Lance Gewer and an incredible array of great South African faces. At its world premiere during the Mill Valley Film Festival, audiences were enraptured, which bodes well for its potential boxoffice. The film is in Zulu and English and has the potential for greater success than just the art house circuit. But because of American screenwriter W. David McBrayer's rather banal script, the film doesn't succeed so much as art as it does as propaganda.
It's impossible to deny "Drum"'s emotional power, which is heightened even more by McBrayer's choice to focus the movie on a beatific young boy, Musa (Junior Singo). Musa lives in a Zulu village where he's been orphaned by AIDS. The villagers think his family is cursed, so Musa heads for Johannesburg to earn enough money to buy a cow for his foster grandmother and to find his uncle. He encounters Nobe (Owen Sejake), a truck driver who gives Musa a lift. In Jo'burg, as it's referred to, Musa washes car windshields on the streets, grateful when drivers flip him a few coins.
Meanwhile, Nobe argues with his wife, who wants him to wear a condom and asks if he's been promiscuous. He refuses to discuss it. (We know he's been with prostitutes.) In a third story line, Nobe's white boss, Pieter Botha (Clive Scott), owner of a distribution company, chides his lawyer son (Tom Fairfoot), who's more interested in helping out a local orphanage than in making money at his father's business. When his son is hospitalized with full-blown AIDS, Pieter begins to understand his son's life.
McBrayer is attempting something Dickensian with these multiple intertwining story lines, and you might be reminded of "Oliver Twist". But McBrayer and Hickson have no fury fueling their film
there's a curious lack of malice. The land is so picturesque and Musa is so sweet and preternaturally wise that he never seems in any real danger, despite some menacing from a street tough in Jo'burg. (Singo has an amazing face, and the audience melts when he smiles, but for all that, he has no real technique or skill as an actor.) There's no mention at all of how governmental policies contribute to the problem. (A failure of nerve?) And the film's conclusion comes off as sentimental and naive. Dickens' happy endings were hard-earned.
The AIDS deaths that occur in the movie are abstract and antiseptic. There is no sense of the appalling physical ravages of the disease: The extreme wasting, the disfiguring opportunistic diseases -- it just seems like a bad flu. (Whenever anyone coughs in this movie, we're meant to understand they have AIDS.) And the forces that encourage the spread of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa are all elucidated in the first 15 minutes of the film, so that it feels like a precis of the Time magazine cover article on the subject. This then is the movie's problem: McBrayer and Hickson have made a film about AIDS in Africa, but what they haven't done is people it with compelling, distinctive characters.
BEAT THE DRUM
Z Prods.
Credits:
Director: David Hickson
Screenwriter: W. David McBrayer
Producers: W. David McBrayer, Karen S. Shapiro, Richard Shaw
Director of photography: Lance Gewer
Production designer: Johnny Breedt
Music: Klaus Badelt, Ramin Djawadi
Costume designer: Ruy Filipe
Editor: Mark Winitsky
Cast:
Musa: Junior Singo
Thandi: Dineo Nchabeleng
Nobe: Owen Sejake
Pieter: Clive Scott
Stefan: Tom Fairfoot
Letti: Noluthando Maleka
Running time -- 114 minutes
No MPAA rating...
Mill Valley Film Festival
MILL VALLEY, Calif. -- South African director David Hickson's "Beat the Drum", a tale of the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, features gorgeous scenery, fantastic cinematography by Lance Gewer and an incredible array of great South African faces. At its world premiere during the Mill Valley Film Festival, audiences were enraptured, which bodes well for its potential boxoffice. The film is in Zulu and English and has the potential for greater success than just the art house circuit. But because of American screenwriter W. David McBrayer's rather banal script, the film doesn't succeed so much as art as it does as propaganda.
It's impossible to deny "Drum"'s emotional power, which is heightened even more by McBrayer's choice to focus the movie on a beatific young boy, Musa (Junior Singo). Musa lives in a Zulu village where he's been orphaned by AIDS. The villagers think his family is cursed, so Musa heads for Johannesburg to earn enough money to buy a cow for his foster grandmother and to find his uncle. He encounters Nobe (Owen Sejake), a truck driver who gives Musa a lift. In Jo'burg, as it's referred to, Musa washes car windshields on the streets, grateful when drivers flip him a few coins.
Meanwhile, Nobe argues with his wife, who wants him to wear a condom and asks if he's been promiscuous. He refuses to discuss it. (We know he's been with prostitutes.) In a third story line, Nobe's white boss, Pieter Botha (Clive Scott), owner of a distribution company, chides his lawyer son (Tom Fairfoot), who's more interested in helping out a local orphanage than in making money at his father's business. When his son is hospitalized with full-blown AIDS, Pieter begins to understand his son's life.
McBrayer is attempting something Dickensian with these multiple intertwining story lines, and you might be reminded of "Oliver Twist". But McBrayer and Hickson have no fury fueling their film
there's a curious lack of malice. The land is so picturesque and Musa is so sweet and preternaturally wise that he never seems in any real danger, despite some menacing from a street tough in Jo'burg. (Singo has an amazing face, and the audience melts when he smiles, but for all that, he has no real technique or skill as an actor.) There's no mention at all of how governmental policies contribute to the problem. (A failure of nerve?) And the film's conclusion comes off as sentimental and naive. Dickens' happy endings were hard-earned.
The AIDS deaths that occur in the movie are abstract and antiseptic. There is no sense of the appalling physical ravages of the disease: The extreme wasting, the disfiguring opportunistic diseases -- it just seems like a bad flu. (Whenever anyone coughs in this movie, we're meant to understand they have AIDS.) And the forces that encourage the spread of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa are all elucidated in the first 15 minutes of the film, so that it feels like a precis of the Time magazine cover article on the subject. This then is the movie's problem: McBrayer and Hickson have made a film about AIDS in Africa, but what they haven't done is people it with compelling, distinctive characters.
BEAT THE DRUM
Z Prods.
Credits:
Director: David Hickson
Screenwriter: W. David McBrayer
Producers: W. David McBrayer, Karen S. Shapiro, Richard Shaw
Director of photography: Lance Gewer
Production designer: Johnny Breedt
Music: Klaus Badelt, Ramin Djawadi
Costume designer: Ruy Filipe
Editor: Mark Winitsky
Cast:
Musa: Junior Singo
Thandi: Dineo Nchabeleng
Nobe: Owen Sejake
Pieter: Clive Scott
Stefan: Tom Fairfoot
Letti: Noluthando Maleka
Running time -- 114 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 11/12/2003
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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