South Africa

Questioning beliefs and practices of ancestral divination in South-African societies, Greetings to the Ancestors, winner of the Tiger Award for Short Film, looks towards the invisible world and investigates the divine power of dreams. Ben Russell intermixes ingredients of documentary, ethnography and dream cinema, to illustrate the fluidity of the boders of consciousness, which dissolve and expand. The camera is either anthropologically engaged in the trance-inducing ceremony of the Jericho Congregation, or quietly tracking healers or poets who give account of vivid dreams induced by the hallucinogen African Dream Root, and eventually races along the African landscape, a surreal red filter applied over its lens. It is an expercise in what Ben Russel defines as psychedelic ethnography: a way to allow for the apparently objective facts of existence to be constantly reframed by radical subjective experience. (Adina Marin, BIEFF)

CAUSE OF DEATH is a simultaneous celebration and elegy of the female body - extensively using archival footage from the first half of the 20th century as well as animations and documents to represent both various feminine rituals across diverse cultures, or moments of intimacy with one's own body, but also to document the burning of "witched" and other forms of extreme violence against women. A cinematic slam poem that encapsulates and reappropriates, from a feminist perspective, two millennia in the history of womankind. (Flavia Dima, BIEFF 2020)

The remains of a huge hedge of wild almond trees now growing in the Cape Town Botanical Garden serve in Judith Westerveld’s film as key element in understanding the history of Dutch colonialism in South Africa. The trees were planted in 1659 by Dutch Commander Jan van Riebeeck with the aim of keeping out indigenous peoples who were raiding the colonists' settlements. By mingling a botanical account on almond trees with the opinions of a tour guide on colonialism, and with fragments from Riebeeck's diary, The Remnant builds a powerful metaphor of colonialism and its aftermaths. The almond branches are so tightly interwoven that they are forced to co-exist, same as the sufferings caused by the colonial past are bound to be remembered, since they are so deeply entwined in the South African present. (Ioana Florescu, BIEFF 2018)

Gangster Backstage is Teboho Edkins' follow-up to Gangster Project, a film he completed a few years before, and for the making of which he ventured in one of Cape Town's most violent black townships where few white people dare to enter, to observe the life of real gansters at first hand. This time, instead of seeking the gangsters in their natural habitat, he summons them to the neutral setting of an empty classroom by lauching a casting call. Interviews, during which the characters  talk candidly about the pros and cons of gangster life alternate with scenes in which they stage their fears and dreams, in a barren Dogville-like decor, with white tapes marking the claustrophobic outline of a prison cell. Between the torment of confinement and the omnipresent threat of an untimely death, these amoral human beings evolve in the South-African society, which has failed so far to come to terms with itself. (Adina Marin, BIEFF)