Africa Is a Country

Reality TV

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

Reality TV

By
Sean Jacobs

The practice of renting out Cape Town’s “scenery” and its cheaper film crews can have its misunderstandings. Take “Safe House,” the new “action thriller” starring Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds, that’s really set in South America. I can only imagine the cliches about South America for which South Africa stands in here. Anyway it sounds more like “Training Day”:

A movie starring Denzel Washington was a little too thrilling for a Cape Town neighbourhood that has experienced gang violence.

Callers to talk radio said they feared gang fights had returned to the township when they heard the sounds of automatic gunfire overnight.

Denis Lillie, head of the Cape Film Commission, said today the producers had been authorised to film a sequence involving car chases and the firing of blanks, and had informed residents in the immediate neighbourhood. But he says the sound carried further than expected.

Lillie says the Cape Town community is getting “used to the fact that people want to film here”. The movie, Safe House, is described as a crime thriller.–SAPA.

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.