The 13th European Film Festival South Africa is here. Over 10 days across 4 cities, audiences will have the opportunity to see some of the best films in current European cinema, fresh from Cannes, Venice, Berlin and beyond. Featuring award-winning films by giants of European cinema alongside bold new voices and starring Europe’s biggest names: this year’s films follow families of all kinds — biological, chosen, broken, rebuilding — fighting to hold together and carve out a future against everything working to pull them apart.
PROGRAMME
SUN 20 Sep 2pm: A Family (The Netherlands) BOOK NOW. Dutch director Mees Peijnenburg offers a quiet but powerful window on divorce in modern Europe told empathetically through the eyes of a brother and sister each trying to each find their own ways and hopefully a path together through the aftermath of the bitter war between their parents.
SUN 20 Sep 4pm: Fatherland (Germany) SOLD OUT!. Oscar winning director Paweł Pawlikowski, European cinema’s master of visual and narrative precision, delivers a tightly controlled, intimate and heartbreaking portrait of German literature’s legendary Thomas Mann as he and his daughter, make a journey across a nation trying to grapple with grief and the horrors of the past as the Cold War rages.
THURS 24 Sep 2pm: Aqui (Portugal) BOOK NOW. Director Tiago Guedes’ ambitious, epic and suitably enigmatic adaptation of the Jesus trilogy of novels by South African Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee stays true to its source material’s humanist hopes, despairs and probing of the eternal philosophical questions that keep families and societies eternally and anxiously moving onward.
FRI 25 Sep 6pm: Christy (Ireland) BOOK NOW. A lovingly crafted Irish social realist story of home and brotherhood that refreshingly pushes beyond despair and misery in favour of often bright, quietly humourous celebration of the spirit and character of the working-class heroes of its Cork setting.
FRI 25 Sep 8pm: The Last Viking (Denmark) BOOK NOW. Mads Mikkelsen leads the star-studded cast of this madcap, blackly comic Danish family-drama/crime-caper-noir about brothers, mental-health, past secrets, the Beatles and getting by with more than a little bit of help from your friends.
SAT 26 Sep 6pm: My Father’s Shadow (UK) BOOK NOW. Winner of the BAFTA Award for Outstanding Debut, British Nigerian director Akinola Davies Jr’s first feature marks the arrival of a vital, bold new voice in world cinema. This is not only one of the most impressive debuts in decades but also one of the most remarkably assured, controlled and executed childhood perspective films in a generation, that carves an exciting new way forward for African set cinematic storytelling.
SUN 27 Sep 1pm: Young Mothers (Belgium) BOOK NOW. The multiple award-winning giants of social realism, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne paint a small, gritty and empathetic portrait of the struggles of young mothers. Abandoned by their families and society, these courageous and anxious young women support each other as they make the first of many tough adult decisions of their lives.
SUN 27 Sep 3:15pm: The Beloved (Spain) BOOK NOW. Javier Bardem gives a compelling, quietly brooding performance in Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s tightly wound psychological thriller, which unravels the fragile webs of relationships between fathers and daughters to ask difficult questions about the personal sacrifices made in the service of art and their emotional cost.
