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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,...

Pluto Film takes rights to Cape Town-set drama.

Berlin-based sales outfit Pluto Film Distribution has picked up rights to South African debut feature The Tree.

The film is from producers Elias Ribeiro and Cait Pansegrouw of Urucu Media, whose previous feature The Wound premiered at Sundance 2017 in the World Competition strand and also played as the opening film of Berlinale Panorama that year. The film was South Africa’s foreign language Oscar entry for 2018 and made the shortlist.

The Tree marks the debut of writer-director Louw Venter. Production is now underway in South Africa and is scheduled to wrap imminently.

In his groundbreaking Oscar-nominated film The Wound, director John Trengove deals with themes relating to tradition and masculinity in modern South Africa. Staring openly gay actor Nakhane Touré, the film offers a brave and honest depiction of a gay love story between two men who have devoted their existence to helping maintain a tradition in which young men are brought into the wilderness each year to undergo the act of circumcision.

Touré is Xolani (nicknamed X), a quiet and lonely factory worker whose life has been dominated by his own standing as a closeted gay man living within the constraints of the traditional Xhosa community. In the hope of being reconciled with a former lover named Vija (Bongile Mantsai), each year X makes his way into the wilderness in order to mentor a group of young boys brought in by their fathers to undergo a traditional rite of passage which...

For his directorial debut, John Trengove ventured into unknown territory: setting his tale of same-sex desire within the secretive world of ulwaluko, the traditional circumcision rite by which a Xhosa boy becomes a man.

The Wound follows Xolani (first-time actor Nakhane Toure), a lonely factory worker who, every year, joins other men from his village in the mountains, where they initiate a new group of teenage boys in the ways of Xhosa manhood. But when Kwanda (Niza Jay), a defiant initiate from the city, discovers Xolani's closeted love affair with another man, his entire existence begins to unravel.

Trengove collaborated...

The cut only only takes a fraction of a second, but the trauma it leaves behind takes a lifetime to heal. It happens every winter, as teenage boys of South Africa’s Xhosa culture are spirited up to the hills around their hometowns, stripped down and smothered in ghostly white paint, and told to spread their legs. Their foreskins are then sliced away by tribal surgeons, many of whom use rusted knives rather than sterile medical equipment. All the same, it’s absolutely forbidden for the initiates to scream out in pain. This is a rite of passage, the start of a three-week initiation ritual meant to confer manhood — boys cry, but men suffer in silence. As Nelson Mandela wrote in his memoir: “An uncircumcised Xhosa man is a contradiction in terms.”

Ukwaluka is a time-honored practice; it began long before Mandela himself endured the experience in 1934, and it still...