Dolly Rathebe
Little Bird's first South African production, SOPHIATOWN has won the award for Best Documentary at the Cape Town World Cinema Festival 2003. SOPHIATOWN celebrates the great popular jazz music of the 1950's in South Africa; a rich tradition deserving international attention. Director Pascale Lamche, traces the music, uncovers the artists who created it and the unique culture in which it thrived, concentrated in Sophiatown, Johannesburg's own Harlem, which fuelled by liberation politics until its destruction by the Apartheid regime. The film features Nelson Mandela and such household names from the jazz world as Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba, Abdullah Ibrahim, Jonas Gwangwa and Caiphus Semenya.
The struggle to eradicate apartheid in South Africa has been chronicled over time, but no one has addressed the vital role music plays in this challenge. This documentary by Lee Hirsch recounts a fascinating and little-known part of South Africa's political history through archival footage, interviews and, of course, several mesmerizing musical performances.
Post-apartheid South Africa is the setting for this drama about a mismatched twosome who end up together on a life-altering journey to Cape Town. Polar opposites Kobus (Ian Roberts), a white ex-soldier who struggles with demons from his past, and Wonderboy (Kagiso Mtetwa), a young black street kid who clings to memories of his family, come together to take on the society that has cast them aside and eventually build a friendship for the ages.
A South-African preacher goes to search for his wayward son who has committed a crime in the big city.
This controversial political thriller, which provoked mass demonstrations and nine deaths in South Africa when it was first shown, gives dramatic form to the African National Congress's basic program of reconcilliation within a non-racialist, democratic society. A train massacre by an Inkatha militant causes the sole witness to the crime to flee the Soweto townships to take refuge in Johannesburg; but the violence follows him when his ANC comrades try to buy guns for a retaliatory raid against Inkatha supporters.
Mapantsula tells the story of Panic, a petty gangster who inevitably becomes caught up in the growing anti-apartheid struggle and has to choose between individual gain and a united stand against the system.
On a normal and tranquil Sunday morning in a native suburb of Johannesburg, an old colored man makes a grand donation of his life savings, forty pounds, to his priest. And while the two are praying for heavenly guidance as to how the money should be spent to help the multitude of needy, a skulking thief makes off with it. Away he goes through the church door, with the old man and the priest in pursuit, shouting "stop, thief!" to rouse the whole quarter. Thus the story begins. But before it reaches a finish, with the money back in the priest's hands and the thief, a slippery rascal, in the heavy hands of the police, the forty pounds has done more service, accidentally, in the cause of good on behalf of several unsuspecting natives than it could ever have done otherwise.
