Neuigkeiten

Click here to read the full article.

Netflix on Tuesday unveiled its slate of African originals, presenting a showcase of local-language series, feature films and non-fiction projects produced in Africa that will roll out across the streamer’s global service later this year and in early 2023.

Highlights include The King’s Horseman, the hotly awaited film adaptation of Noble Prize-winning writer Wole Soyinka’s acclaimed anti-colonial play Death and the King’s Horseman. Adapted and directed by Half of a Yellow Sun helmer Biyi Bandele, the Yoruba-language drama will have its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September.

On the series side, Netflix will premiere its first-ever Afrikaans-language drama, Ludik, on Aug. 26. The six-part actioner stars South African-born Arnold Vosloo (The Mummy) in the title role as Daan Ludik. Rob Van Vuuren, Diaan Lawrenson and Zane Meas co-star.

Nigerian actor/director Akin Omotoso will launch The Brave Ones,...

MoJo also finalises deal with HBO on Chateua Vato.

Morris Ruskin, Jordan Walker-Pearlman and Joseph Mellicker’s new production and management company MoJo Global Arts has licensed US rights on last season’s South African Oscar submission Knuckle City to Showtime.

Jahmil X.T. Qubeka’s film follows an aging professional boxer and his career-criminal brother who is about to be released from prison. The sons of a legendary fighter-turned-gangster team up to create one last shot at fame but encounter more than they bargained for. MoJo Global Arts represents Qubeka.

Ruskin brokered the deal on behalf of MoJo with Helen Huang on behalf of Showtime.

Company launched North American sales in Tiff on South African Oscar submission Knuckle City.

Morris Ruskin and Jordan Walker-Pearlman’s new Los Angeles-based production and management company MoJo Global Arts has unveiled a slate of three projects featuring a Latinx comedy, a Jazz documentary, and an epic TV project about Harlem.

MoJo has come on board as producer’s rep on acquisition title Chateau Vato, a completed Latinx comedy starring Paul Rodriguez. Tom Musca, whose screenplay credits include Stand And Deliver and Tortilla Soup, wrote, directed and produced the film about a gardener who moves into an abandoned mansion with...

Which film will follow on from ‘Roma’ in winning the prize?

Submissions for the best international feature film award at the 2020 Academy Awards have started to come in, and Screen is keeping a running list of each film below.

This is the first year the award will be given under the new name of ‘best international feature film’, after a change in April from ‘foreign-language film’.

Scroll down for latest entries

The eligibility rules remain the same: an international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture produced outside the Us with a predominantly non-English dialogue track and can include animated and documentary features.

South Africa has chosen Jahmil X.T. Qubeka’s “Knuckle City” as its official entry in the Oscars’ International Feature Film category. The movie had its international premiere this week in the Contemporary World Cinema section in Toronto.

“Knuckle City” tells the story of Dudu Nyakama (Bongile Mantsai), an aging boxer whose shot at a big prize fight offers him one last chance at saving his family but drags him into the criminal underbelly of the gritty township he’s spent his life trying to escape. The film’s selection for Oscars contention was announced Tuesday by the National Film & Video Foundation (Nfvf). It world-premiered at the Durban Intl. Film Festival.

Qubeka was also chosen last year to represent South Africa in the Oscar race, with “Sew the Winter to My Skin.” For “Knuckle City,” his fourth feature, he returned to his childhood home of Mdantsane, the township known as South Africa’s boxing mecca,...

South Africa has selected Jahmil X.T. Qubeka's Knuckle City as its submission for the international feature film category at the 2020 Oscars.

The film, which won a best actor prize for star Bongile Mantsai at South Africa's Durban Film Festival, is currently playing in Toronto's Contemporary World Cinema section.

The story follows an aging professional boxer and his career-criminal brother who is about to be released from prison. The two are sons of a legendary fighter-turned-gangster who have followed in their father's footsteps in different ways. They team up to create one last shot at fame ...

It’s 1994 and young Dudu and Duke have little in the way of inspiring role models to build lives for themselves in Mdantsane, South Africa. Apartheid is over and Nelson Mandela is president, but they’re taking notes from a father (Zolosa Xaluva’s Art Nyakama) raving about how “real men” take care of their family despite cheating on his wife with teenagers and barely knowing what his sons are doing or where they are at any moment. What he means by “protection” is the willingness to steal, cheat, and kill—to prove himself better than the next man trying to follow the law or daring to interfere with what he has ownership over. When escape is only possible through the boxing ring, jail, or death, possessions become identity.

Nobody should then be surprised about where these boys find themselves in 2019 as two halves of the same chip off the old block.

Three years after the festival’s final installment of its City to City program, which focused on Lagos, Nigeria, the Toronto International Film Festival remains committed to bringing cinema from underrepresented of regions around the world to its audience of international tastemakers. This year, that effort is especially noticeable for the volume of films made by filmmakers from the African diaspora.

“Making a film is hard, but it’s especially difficult if you’re working without infrastructure or the required resources, in places where film is not necessarily part of the culture,” said Cameron Bailey, the festival’s co-head and artistic director. “And those are the films that we spend the most effort trying to bring to the festival. It’s so easy to get sucked into a bubble of what’s familiar, and I feel that our job is to continue opening audience perspectives.”

The City to City program,...

Aaa Entertainment handles international sales on South Africa-set boxing drama.

Morris Ruskin and Jordan Walker-Pearlman’s new production and management company MoJo Global Arts will launch North American sales in Toronto on festival selection and boxing drama Knuckle City.

South African writer-director Jahmil X.T. Qubeka’s film receives its international premiere in Contemporary World Cinema on Saturday Sept. 7 and stars Bongile Mantsai as a struggling boxer who battles the system and his corrupt younger brother with the aim of lifting his family out of poverty.

Layla Swart produced the film, which premiered at Durban International Film festival in July.