Jaco Bouwer
The Afrikaans drama plays off in a hotel room somewhere in South Africa over five episodes each with its own story, characters, and genres. The episodes are linked together by Marceline, the charming housekeeper with her head in the clouds. She leads the string of diverse characters through their own personal struggles, romances, and tragedies.
On a surveillance mission in a primordial forest, a park ranger encounters two survivalists following a post-apocalyptic lifestyle. The boy and his philosophical father seem to have their own religion, and a mysterious relationship to nature. There are many suspicious aspects to their existence, but when the cabin is attacked by strange, post-human beings one night, she learns that there is a greater threat in this emergent wilderness. Gaia is an ecological horror fantasy which engages the burning issues of our time.
RATGIRL is the digital avatar of artist Jazzard Jaslyn, who crafts endurance performance pieces staged through Instagram stories which re-enact indignities still faced by marginalised people in post-apartheid South Africa. But this country is lonely is most concerned with the dehumanising and flattening effect social media has on our understanding of complex humanitarian crises.
Taking us into what for Mark Augé is the ultimate non-place - an airport waiting lounge - Stacy Hardy and Jaco Bouwer provide still more proof of supermodernity's failure to do away with organic social life. Granted, the space we enter with them is not one of healthy connections between human beings encountering each other in a functional polis. Clearly, theirs is a world of radical disconnects. At the same time, however, it is a world in which people invent highly idiosyncratic lives for themselves - if there is one thing missing here it is precisely uniformity - and in which imaginaries go haywire. Indubitably, the Hardy/Bouwer airport lounge is a dystopian space and this space, it seems fair to say, functions as a synecdoche for a larger social condition. But dystopia here stands in radical opposition to uniformity and it is determined to break the mold of late capitalist habitus (Dominique Malaquais, SPARCK).
A feared gang leader is released on parole after seven years. Has Map Jacobs changed, or is he still the bully? A family and community drama that takes place against the forced relocations from the Cape to the Plains. This piece gives a look at the way of life of the uprooted, their love and pain and the desperate longing for a better existence in a system that especially fails the defenseless.
