Christian Bennett
A ragtag bunch of musicians are forced to rob a bank during the Cape Town Minstrel Carnival in the hope they will save their iconic, but in-debt nightclub in the Bo Kaap.
In the 18 years since Zed Nelson’s seminal photography book Gun Nation was published, 500,000 Americans have been killed by firearms in the US and many more injured. Nelson returns to the people he met, photographs them again, and asks why America is a nation still with an insatiable appetite for firearms. Avoiding stereotypical images of gang members or extremists, Nelson focuses instead on another side of America’s gun culture: the mainly white middle classes who sell and purchase guns in vast numbers. […]
The story takes place in the 1960’s on the impoverished Cape Flats in South Africa. Four boys form a teenage gang to protect themselves from bullying and rape and almost as soon as their childhood pact is declared do they begin the downward spiral to become hardened gangsters. Some years later the gang leader, Abraham, discovers in jail that he has a gift for telling stories and becomes the prison 'cinema' which earns him respect and status whilst his best friend becomes the concubine of the cell boss. On his release our storyteller begins to write his stories and develops a new lease on life with his childhood sweetheart, Jenny. Meanwhile his gang buddies rope him into the murder of a taxi driver for which they will all be hung if proven guilty.
