Wilbert Schübel

Little Bird's first South African production, SOPHIATOWN has won the award for Best Documentary at the Cape Town World Cinema Festival 2003. SOPHIATOWN celebrates the great popular jazz music of the 1950's in South Africa; a rich tradition deserving international attention. Director Pascale Lamche, traces the music, uncovers the artists who created it and the unique culture in which it thrived, concentrated in Sophiatown, Johannesburg's own Harlem, which fuelled by liberation politics until its destruction by the Apartheid regime. The film features Nelson Mandela and such household names from the jazz world as Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba, Abdullah Ibrahim, Jonas Gwangwa and Caiphus Semenya.

Felix in Exile introduces a new character to the 'Drawings for Projection' series: Nandi, an African woman, who appears at the beginning of the film making drawings of the landscape. She observes the land with surveyor's instruments, watching African bodies, with bleeding wounds, which melt into the landscape. She is recording the evidence of violence and massacre that is part of South Africa's recent history. Felix Teitelbaum, who features in Kentridge's first and fourth films as the humane and loving alter-ego to the ruthless capitalist white South African psyche, appears here semi-naked and alone in a foreign hotel room, brooding over Nandi's drawings of the damaged African landscape, which cover his suitcase and walls. Kentridge has commented: 'Felix in Exile was made at the time just before the first general election in South Africa, and questioned the way in which the people who had died on the journey to this new dispensation would be remembered'.

William Kentridge (1955) was inspired in this case by the novel by Italo Svevo The Conscience of Zeno (1923). Kentridge concentrates on the main character whose fears and interior torments reflect the social violence and the brutality of the First World War. Through Zeno, the artist explores the development of notions of history and belonging as well as the way in which our identities are defined by social and political changes. Unlike traditional animated cinema based on thousands of drawings, Kentridge composes his work using a small series of drawings which are successively erased, redrawn and photographed throughout the various stages of creation, which he then mixes with paper cut-outs and archive images. This technique, which he has made his own, thus perfectly illustrates the process of memory which erases, alters and gives rise to multiple images.