The film considers the complex interplay between the individual psyche, the social fabric, and the arid land which sustains life in the Karoo. Local Prince Albert residents tell of divergent lives: of devotion to caregiving beyond the bounds of family; of the philosopher farmer’s relationship with the land; of losing parts of oneself; and of friendship whilst at the mercy of a system that is failing.
Henry
Wilfred
Blinde Piet
Oom Pat
Ouma Maggie
Oom Jaffie
Tannie Tienie

The film considers the complex interplay between the individual psyche, the social fabric, and the arid land which sustains life in the Karoo. Local Prince Albert residents tell of divergent lives: of devotion to caregiving beyond the bounds of family; of the philosopher farmer’s relationship with the land; of losing parts of oneself; and of friendship whilst at the mercy of a system that is failing.
2017-06-17
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First Water - In search of the wellspring - stories of the psyche
7.5Professor Saul David examines Prince Albert's role in shaping British culture, governmental policy and international relations in Victorian Britain.
6.5Historian Lucy Worsley restages the 1840 wedding of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Aided by a team of experts, Worsley recreates the most important elements of the ceremony and the celebrations, scouring history books, archives, newspapers and Queen Victoria's diaries for the details. She reveals how every moment was brilliantly stage-managed for maximum effect. Woven into the recreation of the wedding day is the story of Victoria and Albert's courtship and engagement, and its political importance.
7.2As the only legitimate heir of England's King William, teenage Victoria gets caught up in the political machinations of her own family. Victoria's mother wants her to sign a regency order, while her Belgian uncle schemes to arrange a marriage between the future monarch and Prince Albert, the man who will become the love of her life.
When two amateur hunters accidentally capture their first ever vampire, they are launched on a journey that will take them out into the Klein Karoo to track down and kill an evil blood sucking Prince known as Wyker, thereby fulfilling an ancient prophecy. The only problem, is that the prophecy is a vampire one...and Wyker knows they're coming!
0.0Anne Bean, John McKeon, Stuart Brisley, Rita Donagh, Jamie Reid and Jimmy Boyle are interviewed about their artistic practice and the legacy of Surrealism on their work.
0.0Perhaps this is Robert Vas' most personal film; a portrait of his country - Hungary - as seen through the eyes of an exile. Robert Vas escaped from his homeland after the brutal crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising by the Russians and he was never able to return. He portrays his country through the writings of Hungary's national poets and illustrates the film with images of the Revolution and of the society it would become in the years immediately following 1956. The film was transmitted on the 20th anniversary of the crushing of the uprising.
6.0A documentary about a convent of Russian Orthodox nuns in Estonia who have dedicated their lives to serving God.
0.0A visual artist and a musician create a series of works in which paintings and musical scores form cohesive pieces intended to be experienced together. The works interpret the excitement and monotony of life in the urban desert sprawl from the diverse perspectives of the native and the newcomer.
7.1Featuring unprecedented access inside the White House and State Department, The Final Year offers an uncompromising view of the inner workings of the Obama Administration as they prepare to leave power after eight years.
Dammbeck, himself an alumnus of the Leipzig Academy for Graphic and Book Design, presents the origins of the new German realism developed by the so-called Leipzig School, which took place in the context of socialist-realist dogma in the GDR before the Wall was built in 1961. After the Wall came down in 1989, what happened to the major Leipzig School painters Werner Tübke and Bernhard Heisig, who had been called “Dürer’s red heirs” by West German journalists in the 1970s? In the film, Tübke, Heisig, and former GDR officials who were involved with the cultural scene in Leipzig at the time talk about modernism, conformism, political pressure, party discipline, personal claims, and fading memory. The documentary paints an insightful, often critical picture of early East German art history.
5.0The film explores what transformations in power and politics do to art, how much opportunism can be found in “pure” art and whether fascist symbols can ever regain their aesthetic innocence. The questions it addresses about the relationship between ethics and aesthetics make a valuable contribution to any discussion about art and power.
7.8Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old black mother and sharecropper, was gang raped by six white boys in 1944 Alabama. Common in Jim Crow South, few women spoke up in fear for their lives. Not Recy Taylor, who bravely identified her rapists. The NAACP sent its chief rape investigator Rosa Parks, who rallied support and triggered an unprecedented outcry for justice. The film exposes a legacy of physical abuse of black women and reveals Rosa Parks’ intimate role in Recy Taylor’s story.
0.0This episode from the Czech Journal series examines how a military spirit is slowly returning to our society. Attempts to renew military training or compulsory military service and in general to prepare the nation for the next big war go hand in hand with society’s fear of the Russians, the Muslims, or whatever other “enemies”. This observational flight over the machine gun nest of Czech militarism becomes a grotesque, unsettling military parade. It can be considered not only to be a message about how easily people allow themselves to be manipulated into a state of paranoia by the media, but also a warning against the possibility that extremism will become a part of the regular school curriculum.
Two Meetings and a Funeral explores Bangladesh’s historical pivot from the socialism of the 1973 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) meeting in Algeria to its ideological counterpoint, the emergence of a strong Islamic perspective at the 1974 Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) meeting in Lahore. Centred on Bangladesh’s navigation of these two historic meetings, as well as its fight for United Nations recognition (vetoed by China, acting as a proxy for Pakistan), the film considers the erosion of the idea of the Third World as a potential space for decolonialism, liberation theology and socialism. In particular, it looks at how a transnational Islamic ‘ummah’ concept was used against socialist forces.
0.0A two-channel installation utilizing both digital video and 16mm film, Commensal focuses on the controversial figure of Issei Sagawa, who gained notoriety in 1981 when, as a graduate student in Paris, he murdered a fellow student and engaged in acts of cannibalism. After his release from a mental institution, Sagawa returned to Japan, and later appeared in innumerable documentaries and sexploitation films. In contrast to earlier journalistic documentaries on Sagawa, the film suspends moral judgment and explores a realm that eludes classification as either “documentary” or “pure fiction,” to instead chart the ambiguous territory between crime, fantasy, and social realities, between an individual and the economy of his public persona.