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Adapted from the 2009 novel by Alistair Morgan, Sleeper's Wake is a beautifully shot psychological drama set predominantly in a sleepy holiday town on the south coast of KwaZulu Natal. Built around some strong central performances and featuring some powerful scenes, the film also struggles with a persistently gloomy tone: some modulations in the characters' emotional journeys would've been welcome.

John Wraith (the once again excellent Lionel Newton) is a struggling writer coming to terms with the death of his wife and daughter. After a predictable montage of post-traumatic symptoms, he is urged to pull himself together at a friends house in the jungly environs of Nature's Cove. There he meets a shifty armed response guard and the Venter family, particularly the domineering and devout father, Roelf (Deon Lotz), and his rebellious, predictably voluptuous daughter (Jackie). The Venters, it turns out, are dealing with a family trauma of their own, and the fragile John is drawn into the vortex of Roelf's battle with Jackie. Denial, aggression, despair push the free-spirited, volatile Jackie towards the disbelieving John (much older, not necessarily wiser, and alcoholic) and it is only a matter of time before the two traumatised fathers clash.

The highlight of the film is the combination of Flo Ballack's production design and Willie Nel's cinematography. Sleeper's Wake really is a beautiful film, the heavily forested setting at once fantastical and ominous. Even the sea is framed as a surfer's heaven and yet is terrifying in one scene as a wave builds dramatically before John dives beneath it. Both Newton and Lotz are excellent, though I miss the insouciant slyness that Newton has brought to other performances (see for example, Jump the Gun). Jay Anstey is good as the hot/cold dynamo, Jackie, though - as with all the performances - a little levity and surprise would thicken the characters. Though the Rockwellian storekeepers come close to providing some humorous relief, what is missing throughout are moments of surprise.

The film's climax will either sell you on the film or disappoint you. I really liked it. It focuses Afrikaans author Eugene Marais's meditations on baboons through a contemporary lens and provides the necessary eruption of tension that the narrative promises all along.

The lack of tonal variation aside, Sleeper's Wake is a strong film and an assured feature debut for director Barry Berk after his extensive work in South African television. It is also pleasing to see the richness of the country's literary production being adapted by South African filmmakers into compelling local productions.

An extraordinary film, dense and lyrical, sharply political and deeply personal. As in Sankofa, writer/director Haile Gerima moves between several worlds - not just 'Africa' and the Ethiopian diaspora in Europe, but also (as another reviewer has noted) between Ethiopias and Europes, temporally and geographically.

At times, these worlds merge effortlessly together; however, in certain scenes, the acting and staging seem rather stilted. For example, I found the Ethiopian scenes were always compelling, while some of the German scenes had characters merely saying their lines.

Gerima's use of flashbacks and flashfowards helps to weave together many narrative strands, not just the political commentary about Ethiopia's traumatic period under the rule of Mengistu. There is a genuine sense of optimism and celebration from the young Ethiopians (including Anberber and his best friend Tesfaye) as the rule of Selasie comes to an end tempered by the terrifying consequences for both men of their idealism and pragmatism, respectively. There is also a narrative of orphans, young men left parentless because of the civil war and Ethiopia's conflicts with Italy. In fact, the closing scene reminds me a lot of Rossellini's Rome, Open City. There is the subtle and not-so-subtle racism experienced by Ethiopians living in a Germany that moves, not unproblematically, from division to unification. There is the painful disintegration of family, seen in Anberber's relationship with is mother and brother, and their position within the community of the village.

Most tellingly, Gerima's nuanced look at patriarchy and politics in the metropolis and the countryside in Ethiopia provides tremendous context for the brutal armed conflict that erupts unexpectedly throughout the film.

And yet this is also an extraordinarily beautiful film with passages of bright hope and love. Gerima may be withering in his critique of various political systems, but he is not defeated by them. This is what makes Teza such a human film, one of best films I have seen about war and society.

Annalet Steenkamp's examination of post-apartheid Afrikaner identity through the lens of her own family is, by turns, fascinating, shocking, moving and curious. It is perhaps its unevenness that I found distracting, though its approach to the material is never less than interesting.

Steenkamp films her extended family on various farms in the Free State as they deal with the exigencies of life on isolated farms, from the economic pressure on farmers, to labour management and the pervasive threat of violence and death. People are married, children are born, some die peacefully and some are murdered brutally. Steenkamp's voice is often heard asking questions of her relations, though she herself remains something of a cypher, a filmmaker amongst salt-of-the-earth farmers and so something of an outsider.

The struggle she captures is the desire to maintain a way of life that is partly mythological - a land bequeathed by God - and partly very human: where will I go and what will I do if I don't live and work on the farm. She captures the idealism of the young and the bitter, casual racism of the older generations, along with the strange paradoxes that lead one character to angrily denounce interracial relationships yet fondly celebrate the relationship she shares with the gardener who helps her tend her garden.

The style is revelatory and, at times almost impressionistic, with key events signalled by natural phenomena and stylised compositions. At one point, I felt like I was watching the ominous scenes just before the locust plague in Malick's Days of Heaven. Some viewers might find these choices irritating, especially as they occur alongside several other shooting styles from hand- held camera to de-centered interviews. I enjoyed the experimental approach, though, even when it didn't work. What I'm less certain about is Steenkamp's open-endedness and strange distance from the subjects, as if she can't quite decide to be there or not be there.