Thursday, May 7, 2009

Intonga - The Stick Fighter


Last night I was absolutely blown away.
I attended a screening of a brand-new feature film in isiXhosa (with English Sub-Titles).
What made this movie fascinating is that it was a co-production between a professional movie house  Swayani, and the Cape Peninsula University of Technology.
The movie was written and directec by JJ van Rensburg. He Swayani provided a skeleton crew, and CPUT students had to learn the ropes to take part en every facet of the production, including cameo acting.
The movie is a nice "feel good" film that is really well made in an African idiom showing great sensitivity for its people and its natrue.
This was an amazing feat, considering that the shooting took a mere 10 days.
I really hope that we can go this route not only with film production, but also with various other projects.
I have encouraged Jared Borkum, head of the Film section and the spearhead of the project from the CPUT side to consider writing his Doctoral Thesis on what he learnt in the process. I hope that in this way we can learn valuable lessons of how to do the same in other fields.

Go and see it.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hi Johannes. Thanks for the nice words. I have suggested to Jared that each year, the final year students can make a feature film instead of several smaler movies. This will propel their careers into bigtime even before they leave film school.
Regards
JJ van Rensburg