© Teboho Edkins Film still © Teboho Edkins
Kunsthaus Graz
Space04
Lendkai 1, 8020 Graz, Austria
T +43-316/8017-9200
Film screenings with Teboho Edkins
This evening is part of the Where film cultures meet series organised by Megaphon magazine and marks the start of the exhibition Dizziness – Navigating the Unknown.
Teboho Edkins (*1980) became well known for his short films and documentary films about life in South Africa after apartheid had ended. Having grown up in Lesotho (his mother is German, his father South African), his films are shaped by a search for borders: between belonging and intrusion, between documenting and fictional storytelling, between film and video art. His work often reflects on processes of creativity, filmmaking and life.
His films and projects have already been presented internationally and received international prizes. In 2014, he won the main prize of the International Jury at the International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen for his film Gangster Backstage.
By turns intense and gentle, Edkins, who doesn’t worry about genres, investigates the complex reality of life at the edge, where the immediate proximity of death is part of daily reality. As an exploration of private stories alternating between onstage and backstage, this perceptive work is an outstanding film portrait.
– Jury of the International Competition
Colour film, sound, digital, 10 min
High up in the mountains of Lesotho, 10-year-old Mosaku waits for his brother to return. After a five-month initiation ceremony, which took place in a hidden place with a group of young men, he returns to the village a changed person. The viewers only hear about which rituals and treatments have taken place from those who speculate about events.
Colour film, digital, 38 min
There is a casting in South Africa. Teboho Edkins interviews gangsters and asks them to act out their everyday life on stage. What is exceptional about the situation is that the film increasingly reveals that the protagonists are not professional actors from Cape Town, but real gangsters. Relevant experience was welcomed. Scenes on an empty, increasingly cramped and oppressive stage, which conveys a sense of danger, alternate with intimate and moving interviews. The viewer is reminded of the important film Dogville by Lars von Trier (2003), as the stage becomes a heterotopic space far away from norms and a performance that walks a line between fiction and reality turns the scenes into a nightmarish prison, or conjures up a confessional, stirring up powerful images of death, which is threating and ever-present.
In English and German language.
In cooperation with Megaphon and Café Global. In relation to Africa.
