Word: african
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...know how many South Africans feel about the arrival in Cape Town of Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon to shoot a Clint Eastwood movie about South Africa's 1995 Rugby World Cup victory over the New Zealand All Blacks. It's not that Freeman (playing President Nelson Mandela) or Damon (who stars as Springbok captain Francois Pienaar) will do a bad job. South African actors Vosloo (The Mummy) and Chweneyagae (the Oscar-winning Tsotsi) wouldn't either. It's just a little strange that South Africa's most important stories are so often told by foreigners. "Imagine how the Americans...
Raleigh is part of a new generation of South African filmmakers determined to take back the country's stories and invest them with a spirit that goes deeper than skin. He produced 2005's Tsotsi, a film about a township hoodlum who steals a car - and the rich black couple's baby in its back seat - which shattered once and for all the naive but, among outsiders, popular notion that all South Africa's stories can be framed in terms of black and white. Another is director Michael Raeburn, who has just released Triomf, a bleak examination of a poor...
...script made real. And Hollywood has shot that script over and over again. In 2004, Samuel L. Jackson and Juliette Binoche made In My Country about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in the mid- to late '90s, and Hilary Swank starred as an attorney representing a black South African political activist seeking amnesty in Red Dust. Then came Catch a Fire (terrorism during apartheid) with Tim Robbins in 2006 and Goodbye Bafana (the friendship between Mandela and his white prison guard) with Joseph Fiennes in 2007. This year brings Endgame, a thriller about the secret talks to end apartheid...
...alone one with South Africa's unrivalled ethnic mix and bloody history. When Tsotsi won its best foreign film Oscar in 2006, the cast and crew went to Mandela's house for a celebration. "After he congratulated us, he told us: 'We should be very careful of our South African stories,' " says Kenneth Nkosi, who played Tsotsi's friend Aap. "'Do not tell our stories in the wrong way. Remember that there is no one in the world who is not flawed.' He was saying: 'I am a man. I am not this perfect icon Hollywood makes...
...daughter in dirt-poor KwaZulu Natal. In 2007 came Bunny Chow, a hip black-and-white comedy about three comedians traveling to a festival that recalled early Spike Lee. Last year featured Jerusalema, a sophisticated thriller about the rise and fall of a Johannesburg slumlord - a kind of South African American Gangster - which made its star, Rapulana Seiphemo, the new face of South African cinema. Later this year Seiphemo teams up with Tsotsi's Nkosi in White Wedding, a road movie that, with impressive maturity, plays apartheid's legacy of racial division for laughs...