Christiaan Olwagen
Tannie Maria sees food as "medicine for the body and heart". She envies romance as much as she enjoys cooking and eating. But it's death that shakes up Tannie Maria's life, when one of the correspondents to her column is brutally murdered.
Based on the Elsa Joubert novel "The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena" tells the story of a South African woman, an Afrikaans speaking Xhosa mother, whose life revolves around her family and finding stability in a period of insufferable upheaval in the country. When her husband, Stone, became too ill to work, Poppie was deemed by the law to be an "illegal" resident in her own country. She engaged in a desperate struggle with the authorities for permission to stay, moving from house to house, applying for permits, applying for extensions, extensions of extensions, and using every means at her disposal to remain with her children. Caught in the cross fire of her children's needs, her husband's illness, community anger and repressive laws, she was finally forced to give in just as the 1976 riots for freedom erupted.
Christiaan Olwagen (Johnny is nie Dood nie, Kanarie) adapts Anton Chekhov's classic play, The Seagull, to film, and places it in South Africa in the 1990’s, almost one hundred years after it was written.
Kanarie (Afrikaans for 'Canary') is a coming-of-age musical war drama. Drafted into the South African army during apartheid, a young soldier joins the military's traveling choir, and romance on the battlefield causes him to deal with his long-repressed sexual identity through hardship, camaraderie, first love, and the liberating freedom of music, the true self can be discovered.
