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At the heart of South Africa’s underworld, Unseen Season 2 unfolds like a fractured mirror, reflecting a society gripped by power’s unseen currents. From the moment Zenzi Mwale is hauled into a cell—her freedom stripped away, her body carrying new life—the series asks: when the self is reduced to a target, what remains?

Zenzi’s predicament is stark. Arrested for a string of killings, she awakens behind bars with a secret burgeoning within her. Pregnancy becomes both burden and beacon, a reminder that creation can spring from brokenness. As the walls close in, she must combat more than stone and iron. A sprawling bank conspiracy—threads woven through politics, wealth, ancestral privilege—threatens to smother her quest for redemption.

The season’s pulse never softens. Shadows cradle every corridor; neon flickers off prison bars. Action sequences feel less spectacle than ritual, each blow exchanged carrying the weight of existential defiance.

Exclusive: Showmax content chief Yolisa Phahle has revealed how co-producing with international partners has helped the South Africa-based streamer compete with fierce SVoD competition, as a first trailer for its epic fantasy drama Blood Psalms is today unveiled. You can watch it here below.

Blood Psalms, from creators Layla Swart and Jahmil X.T. Qubeka from Yellowbone Entertainment, is a big budget co-production with France’s Canal+ — the latest in several collaborations between the companies — and is billed as Showmax’s “biggest and most ambitious series, completely unlike any other African series you’ve ever seen” by Nomsa Philiso, Executive Head of Programming at the streamer’s parent MultiChoice. The fantasy drama, shot entirely in African languages, has touches of Game of Thrones, set 11,000 years ago in ancient Africa in a world of warring factions and magic.

The synopsis reads: “In Ancient Africa, one thousand days after the fall of Atlantis,...

The South African Film and Television Awards (SAFTAs), considered to be South Africa's equivalent of the Oscars, and the premier film and television industry awards in the country, announced its winners this past weekend.  The SAFTAs are under the custodianship of the National Film and Video Foundation (Nfvf), and only South African film and television productions are eligible for the awards. Jamil X.T. Qubeka's controversial film Of Good Report won big at the awards, winning best supporting actor (Tshamano Sebe), best supporting actress (Tina Jaxa), best actor (Mothusi Magano), best writing and directing (Jahmil X.T. Qubeka), and last but not...

It’s fair to say that when you discover a film has been banned in its respective country of origin, intrigue kicks in as you wonder what it was about this particular feature that caused so much controversy. However it only takes a mere matter of seconds to work it out in Jahmil X.T. Qubeka’s Of Good Report, as this South African picture begins with a man picking bits of metal out of his skull – and from this point onwards, the shock factor grows to become more intense, and more severe.

The man in question is Parker Sithole (Mothusi Magano), an introverted high school teacher who arrives in town on the hunt for a new job. However he gets more than he bargained for when he enters in to a passionate, sexual affair with his student Nolitha (Petronella Tshuma). Though unaware she’s a student of his to begin with,...

A teacher-pupil affair spirals into sexual obsession and violence in this edge-of-the-seat thriller from Jahmil Xt Qubeka

The London film festival has presented me with an exciting discovery this year: the South African film-maker Jahmil Xt Qubeka, who brings some scalding steam-heat with a sensational noir thriller in black and white called Of Good Report. (It is actually his third feature, following two previous films, uMalusi and A Small Town Called Descent, which have yet to show up on IMDb.) Watching this brazenly shocking and gripping film, I remembered the feeling I had on seeing Christopher Nolan's low-budget black-and-white debut, Following. Here is a director who is going places.

The drama concerns a shy, spindly, bespectacled young man called Parker Sithole, played by Mothusi Magano. He has an enigmatic, stricken look – like Jack Nance in Eraserhead or Anthony Perkins in Psycho. Parker is new in town, having turned up...

★★★★☆ Rasping breath accompanies a pristine, monochrome shot from the point-of-view of a man stumbling across an area of scrubland. Two workmen stop to stare as he is revealed like some sub-Saharan gunslinger, pistol protruding from the top of his trousers, face and shirt awash with blood. A stark close-up follows his hand as he painfully extracts two teeth that have somehow been embedded in the top of his head; he laughs maniacally. Welcome to the weird and uncomfortably disturbing world of Jahmil X.T. Qubeka's noirish, blackly comic tale of obsession, Of Good Report (2013), in show at this year's Lff.

Briefly banned in its native South Africa, this is the provocative tale of teacher Parker Sithole (Mothusi Magano) who arrives at a small provincial school with the titular commendation. Without uttering a single line of dialogue, he commands attention from the get-go with his horrifying transformation from nebbish lecturer to...

Controversial film Of Good Report, initially banned by South African censors for its depiction of a teacher’s affair with a pupil, has been picked up by sales agent 6 Sales ahead of its world premiere at Toronto.

Of Good Report stars Mothusi Magano as a teacher who embarks on an affair with his pupil, played by Petronella Tshuma, with tragic consequences.

The film was prevented from opening the Durban International Film Festival earlier this year due to a refusal of classification by the South African Film and Publications Board, but has since screened in South Africa following a successful appeal by the producers.

6 Sales will act as sales agent for the film, which will debut at the Toronto International Film Festival (Tiff) on Sept 6. It has also been selected for the Official Competition of the London Film Festival, which runs next month.

Of Good Report was directed by Jahmil X.T. Qubeka and produced by Michael Auret of [link...

One of the movies flying below the radar of the festival circuit line-ups is Jahmil Xt Qubeka's South African ode to the noir Of Good Report. But Qubeka's film is not a mystery but rather a thriller that was, for a period, banned in the writer/director's native South Africa.

Mothusi Magano stars as Parker Sithole, a newly recruited teacher who has a sexual encounter at a bar with a woman he thinks is in her twenties but later turns out to be underage and a student in his class but what started as a one time chance encounter soon turns into an obsession that unravels Sithole, a man already a bit unhinged.

The trailer for Of Good Report is gorgeous, a stark black and white affair that is loaded with sexuality and the music gives it the feel of a fevered dream that spirals [Continued ...]...

Tsotsi (2005) Direction: Gavin Hood Cast: Presley Chweneyagae, Mothusi Magano, Terry Pheto, Jerry Mofokeng, Nambitha Mpumlwana, Rapulana Seiphemo Screenplay: Gavin Hood; from Athol Fugard's novel Oscar Movies, European Film Award Movies Recommended with Reservations Presley Chweneyagae, Tsotsi Mostly spoken in Tsotsi Taal, or "gangster dialect," Tsotsi is the tale of a Johannesburg shantytown hoodlum nicknamed Tsotsi, or "Thug," who rediscovers his humanity after accidentally kidnapping an infant during a carjacking. The premise, of course, is totally absurd* (see below). Director-writer Gavin Hood's screenplay — based on Athol Fugard's significantly more downbeat Apartheid-era novel — never convincingly explains why the brutal, heartless Tsotsi (Presley Chweneyagae) would want to keep the child. True, the baby is a reminder of his long-buried childhood — he had lost his mother to AIDS and had suffered at the hand of his alcoholic father — but by keeping the baby Tsotsi is putting his own life at risk...