City Girl

Cape Town
Director / editor: Niklas Zimmer
Camera: James Tayler
Performer: Catherine Scott
Voices: Katherine Bull, Deborah Poynton, Renate Meyer
1'00’’
2009

Sitting naked on her balcony, a woman blurs the line between public and private space, exploring both her comfort and discomfort in the city. She muses about why she likes living there and how it empowers her, as well as increases her sense of vulnerability.

Fragmented

Cape Town
Co-director / Poet / Choreographer: Khanyisile Mbongwa
Co-director / Camera / editor: James Tayler
Performers: Zenande Mankayi, Nicole Olsen
4'53’’
2009

In Cape Town, a city divided along race and class lines, two women can't quite meet and can't quite let go. One gay, one straight, one black, one coloured, the spaces they inhabit connect them, and yet become the thing that separates them from each other. "Fragmented" is a dance poem about the physical and psychological identity of women in the city. They dance in urban spaces marked by masculine architecture that denies the organic curves of their bodies. They venture into marginal areas in which they are subject to intimidation or violation, areas marked by gang graffitti where only men walk safely. Their silhouettes become windows into the cityscape, in a film that dreams of a place where, in a line from the hushed internal monologue of the poem, "I forget your sex and your skin colour".

(Un)veiling

Cape Town
Videographer: Mandilakhe Yengo
Performer: Alude Mahali
Poet: Gary Cummiskey
2'51’’
2009

(Un)veiling explores voyeurism and the power of the gaze. In the midst of the bustle of constrained living spaces in the city, privacy becomes a necessity but isn’t always a given. The city has eyes; it covers and uncovers and someone is always watching- hidden or revealed. Using the poem “Corner Café” by Gary Cummiskey, as its premise, (Un)veiling looks at the fine line between seeing, being seen and not seeing.

Circles

Cape Town
Writer / director: Terry Westby-Nunn
01’54’’
2009

The circle is a prevalent symbol within the city - hardwired for signage, transport and mechanical efficiency. Our lives are ordered by the circle, both externally and internally. This video poem asks viewers whether they too are running rings around their city lives.

I walk the street with loose parts

Cape Town
Choreographer: Louise Coetzer
Editor: Eben Smal
Cinematography: Oscar O'Ryan
Director: Ryan Kruger
Music: Gustav Stutterheim
Producer: Adrian Hogan
04'00''
2008

A dance film inspired by Deborah Steinmair’s poem Dream Weaver. We spend so much time living past one another, we become so caught up in our own small spaces. What is beautiful to see is the strict contrast between a space which normally carries a mass of human traffic, and then to see it empty and deserted. So many of the buildings we surround ourselves with function only from sunrise to sunset and yet there are endless stories to imagine in those spaces after hours. This for me is truly the city alive, with a breath and heart beat that slows down as the day draws to an end. – Louise Coetzer

Between

Johannesburg
Artist / poet: Colleen Alborough
Sound artist / voice: João Orecchia
2'51’’
2009

Between is an exploration of Johannesburg city space. It considers how daily movement through exterior city space infiltrates and affects your interior world. Between tracks a turbulent journey along a tarred road. It traces the tarmac and the road-markings along the way. Its pace is fast and creates a disorienting viewing experience, as the road-markings and sounds are animated in sync with the speed of the journey. It explores the pace of Johannesburg and the constant, dizzying speed that embodies our way of being in this city.

This Place Forever (excerpt)

Pretoria
Artist / director: Fabian Oliver Wargau
Composer: Hedley Vincent
2009

This excerpt from This Place Forever is a broken debate between two twenty-somethings about insecurity, love affairs and the environment of the city. The video drastically abbreviates their reflections on the permanence versus non-permanence of life as well as compatibility versus incompatibility between people, becoming in itself something transitory, to be used like the city. The film draws on a combination of poetic visual texts which are displayed as subtitles against the raw sound of passing vehicles and the hushed underlying original score.

To those who belongs the earth shall belong the sky up to the heavens

Pretoria
Artist / director: Maaike Bakker
Sound: Christian Henn
1’46’’
2009

In this stop motion video of sky scenery embedded with text, the sky becomes a new intangible landscape, an extension of the city. In focusing on the constant search for unchartered territory, the video deals with the theme of the cities limitless and constant transformation. It investigates the old roman principle “Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad caelum et ad inferos“, which roughly translated states: ”To those who belongs the earth..(shall belong the sky up to the heavens)”. The video refers to the city in terms of its never-ending evolvement, to the extent where the only remaining space for development is above us, in the sky. It addresses and simultaneously satirises the rapid course of society’s progress in terms of spatial development.

The sound for the video was created by Christian Henn, only making use of air driven

instruments, a pedal organ and an accordion.

Jackson 5

Johannesburg
Artist / director: Sean Buch
Camera / editor: Emma Jane Laurence
Sound: DJ Yoji a.k.a Simon Tollman
2’ 50’’
2009

Graffiti artists attempt to create a private space within the city through the act of tagging, writing their pseudonym in public space. Painting is considered by many to be a cloistered process executed in a studio or private space. This video, inspired by hip-hop and graffiti culture, plays on the tensions of the a painter’s public and private identity, and his relationship to the cities of Gauteng. The title Jackson 5 makes reference both to the American Abstract Expressionist artist Jackson Pollock and the Pop group of the 60s and 70s.

waitless

Cape Town
Choreographer / director: Ananda Fuchs
4’40’’
2009

Three women sit in an empty suburban swimming pool: one who speaks the other’s mind, one who translates into her lover’s language and one whose mind is being spoken. They are all suspended in waiting. The film uses the words from the Leonard Cohen poem, “Dance Me to the End of Love”, as the women’s bodies remember the rhythm of love and of loss and are swept up in the dance, switching ultimately to a lovers’ tango on the beach – a memory or fantasy?

Player 1.1

Port Elizabeth / Grahamstown
Artist / director: Mark Wilby
Performer: Gary Gordon
4'00''
2008

A man in a desolate warehouse landscape mutters the obsessive rhythms of share prices and stock market reports. It is an accountant’s incantation of shock, the nightmare of a stockbroker, evidence of an addiction that has erased him, adding up to nothing.

Walking in Plastic

Cape Town
Choreographer / performer: Mduduzi Nyembe
Poet / voice: Bandile Gumbi
Artist / director: Kai Lossgott
2009

Performance artist Mduduzi Nyembe presents a memory of a wounded woman, a dream for an absent father, and a dance in a street market for survival. They are ritual stories of the heartache of the slums – substance abuse, violence, gender inequalities, chronic unemployment, families’ incapacity to provide for and protect their children. Each of Nyembe’s characters, taken from his daily interactions in the township, is left, in the words of poet Bandile Gumbi, "a constant wanderer / always at the beginning of complete circles", trapped in the existential cycle of poverty.

Terra Obscura

Cape Town
Artist / programmer / director: Maia Grotepass
02'00''
2009

Terra Obscura displays the joint layered effects of computerised forces and human intervention on two sites on the developing edge of greater Cape Town. Grotepass interprets the data to mirror and highlight processes observable in landscape changes that occur due to “low density sprawl”. Informal human interaction and natural processes are mapped to random-based algorhythms. Geometric algorhythms create visual structures referring to formal planned development of the sites. This video is an exploration of imagery captured from an interactive installation work with the same title.

TV Programs 001: Powerlines / Web of Life

Cape Town
Artist / director: Nileru
03’10''
2007

An abstract photomontage work that engages with the electrical power lines which characterizes our urban environment. The combination of still photography, repetition and Solfreggio sound frequencies produce an audiovisual sensory experience which is at once calming and meditative to some, while excruciatingly irritating to others.

The Electrician

Cape Town
Artist / director: Terry Westby-Nunn
Poet / voice / performer: Tanya van Schalkwyk
2'5''
2009

Cities are the dressing rooms of our dreams / fantasies. "The Electrician" romps through another side of Cape Town's blackouts and energy crises, as well as the mind of a city dweller. Is the electrician a figment of her imagination or is she part of an underground city - alternate to the one we read about in the papers and believe to be true? Reality or imaginary, the city plays dress up with our minds.

Omdat ek die stadsrumoer (Because I chose the city noise)

Cape Town
Artist / director: Koeka Stander
Poet: William Rowland
Voice: Helene Rowland
03'21''
2009

A video poem that evokes the silent, boxed-in world of creatures living in aquarium tanks, viewed by casual tourists. In them we see our mirrored selves, trapped inside the noisy city landscape. The writer of the poem and song in this film was blinded at age four, but at 69 still has vivid memories of visiting an aquarium.

Waiting

Johannesburg
Artist / director: Rat Western
05’16’’
2007

Waiting is a lonely, domestic experience of urban, inner-city living as told from the perspective of a particular inhabitant. Waiting was originally designed as a comic/graphic story and was printed in book form, but was converted to a film for exhibition purposes.

Karohano

Johannesburg
Choreographer / director: Jeanette Ginslov
4'30''
2009

Karohano, meaning pieces in Sesotho, is a collaborative dance video representing three male dancers from Madagascar and South Africa. It is a fusion of video technology and urban dance energy, revealing aspects of African male identity, political satire and ironic gestures. Nominated for Jury Short Award Cinedans, Netherlands, 2008.

I lost a poem

Johannesburg
Artist / director: Erica Luttich
Poet / artist: Anni Snyman
3'00''
2009

This video poem laments the loss of slow significant contact that a vehicle bound city inhabitant experiences, but also exalts in the infinitely interesting stream of image, noise and thought that flows by. In the timeframe of the automobile, images, moments and themes repeat continually. This transforms the city into an experience of motion and rhythm, rather than locality.

Sound and Sign Language Poems

Durban
Artist / director: Lolette Smith
Performer: Michaela Smith
7'09''
2008

Sign Language poems are visual poems in their own right, with their own syntax, morphology and poetic rules. In 'Car on a bumpy road' the 'C' shaped hands become the bouncing car wheels while the body wrestles the bumps on the road. 'A' shaped hands clutch the steering wheel turning this way and that. 'R' shaped hands eventually become the smooth road. Cultural/language barriers can be ignored as the poems inform the viewer of the rich diversity of the visual language of Sign.