Africa Is a Country

Oliver Hermanus at Cannes

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Oliver Hermanus at Cannes

By
Sean Jacobs

“Skoonheid,” the new film by South African director Oliver Hermanus will be screened in the Un Certain Regard section of this year’s edition of the Cannes Film Festival (starting next month). He is in good company. Check the Cannes site to see who else got invited.

The film is also the first Afrikaans film to be included in Cannes Film Festival’s official program. The film–the title translates as “Beauty”– “… tells the story of Francois van Heerden, a mid-40s, white, Afrikaans-speaking family man living in Bloemfontein, who has become devoid of any care or concern for his own measure of happiness, and so convinced of his ill-fated existence, that he is wholly unprepared when a chance encounter unravels his clean, controlled life.”

I like the film language of Hermanus (he studied film at the University of Cape Town, UC Santa Barbara and the London Film School), so I’m looking forward to seeing it whenever. Hermanus’ debut film, “Shirley Adams,” which I saw at the New York African Film Festival last year, a claustrophobic film about the desperate lives of a working class woman and her disabled son, is definitely worth a look.

Sources: Film Contact, Festival du Cannes, Screen Daily

Further Reading

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.