Michelle Bestbier
2021
Sarafina!
Darrell James Roodt
Leleti Khumalo, Whoopi Goldberg
The plot centers on students involved in the Soweto Riots, in opposition to the implementation of Afrikaans as the language of instruction in schools. The stage version presents a school uprising similar to the Soweto uprising on June 16, 1976. A narrator introduces several characters among them the school girl activist Sarafina. Things get out of control when a policeman shoots several pupils in a classroom. Nevertheless, the musical ends with a cheerful farewell show of pupils leaving school, which takes most of act two. In the movie version Sarafina feels shame at her mother's (played by Miriam Makeba in the film) acceptance of her role as domestic servant in a white household in apartheid South Africa, and inspires her peers to rise up in protest, especially after her inspirational teacher, Mary Masombuka (played by Whoopi Goldberg in the film version) is imprisoned.
Sarafina!
Crazy Safari
Billy Chan Wui-Ngai
N-Xau, Lam Ching-Ying
Two guys, one of them a magician, are transporting an ancient chinese vampire who can only be controlled by a series of yellow tapes, and is the ancestor of the other guy. On the way, while flying over Africa, their plane stalls. And of all places, where do they land? That's right, in the village of the tribe of "The Gods Must Be Crazy".
Crazy Safari
Désirs noirs - Belle comme le diable
Patrice Gautier
Julia Channel, Michelle Bestbier
A young woman called Amy, without scruple or taboo, embarks upon a career of robbery and murder, eventually taking up with the family of an upper middle class man and briefly leading a provincial life. Because she has nothing to lose, Amy is desperate to gain money and power. If men are susceptible to her charms, women must be even more wary of her diabolic schemes. For love or money there is no mercy for women.
Dark Desires: A Taste for Murder
To the Death
Darrell James Roodt
John Barrett, Michel Qissi
Kickboxing champ Rick Quinn decides to retire from the ring, but his main adversary, Denard, wants him to fight again and murders Quinn's wife. Quinn suspects Denard, but can't do anything. Three month later, Quinn is jailed after a drunken bar brawl; a rich man named Le Braque bails him out and asks him to fight for him.
To the Death
Agent Orange
Robert Davies
Phillip Brown, Ron Smerczak
Steve Woodman, a CIA official working for the United States Department of Agriculture, is gathering information about the illegal manufacture and use of Agent Orange, a defoliant used during the Vietnam War to destroy jungle growth and reveal enemy troops. But the lethal chemical proved to be a sentence worse than death for the babies born to anyone who came into contact with it. His investigations lead him to Africa and Clive Hyde, a bullying fertilizer baron whose greed for wealth far outweighs his social conscience. Posing as a journalist for an agricultural magazine, Steve suspects that it is Hyde's chemical plant that provides the crop spraying fertilizer used by the sugar cane farmers to make their crop grow taller. When the beautiful, young widow, Sarah Williams, shows Steve her stunted and grotesquely twisted vegetable crop, his suspicions are confirmed; and when he discovers Patrick and Maria's disfigured child he sets out to crush Hyde's illicit operation.
Toxic Effect
Oh Schucks...! Here Comes UNTAG
David Lister
Leon Schuster, Bill Flynn
Kwagga Robertse owns a farm shop in the fictional Southern African country of Nambabwe and usually cons foreign tourists by pretending to kill a lion, thus earning him the nickname 'Urumbo' (Lion Killer) from the country's natives. Kwagga is upset when the UN sends a platoon of incompetent soldiers with the United Nations Transition Assistance Group (U.N.T.A.G.), to monitor the peace process, and ensure free and fair elections after the Nambabwean War for Independence. The U.N.T.A.G's American leader, Major Bradick D. Mackay and his second-in-command, Captain Zapman are offered a diamond worth a lot of money in the U.S., and they must pay 200,000 USD to Duan Robertse, Kwagga's competitive brother trying to buy a farm left to them by their dead father.
Oh Schucks...! Here Comes UNTAG
