Description
Sin título
A newly married couple, Steve and Ann, arrive on the Karoo sheep farm Steve runs together with his father. A city girl, it will be a new experience for Ann, who is introduced to life on the farm by her husband and father-in-law. Activities are followed over a period of a year, from the lambing season to the shearing of the flock of some 3,000 sheep. It also touches upon the inevitable set-backs, which include drought, various illnesses to which sheep are prone and the menace of a predator jackal that fatally injures a prize ram. With the exception of the “boss boy”, Hendrik, the farm labourers feature only marginally, notably when a witchdoctor is called upon to get rid of the jackal.
The film was sponsored by the South African Wool Board and points out that wool is the country’s second largest export commodity after gold.
Steve’s father is played by Cecil Cartwright, who had a small role in Zoltan Korda’s “Cry, the beloved country” (1951) and there is an uncredited appearance by Nico Carstens.
Example item Scope and content
A detailed macro photograph capturing the delicate beauty and intricate structure of a wild mushroom in its natural grassland environment
Example item Scope and content
Beaufort West lies in the Great Karoo and most people regard it merely as the town you pass through on your way from Cape Town to Johannesburg. However, people do live there and one of them is the poet and singer Gert Vlok Nel (b. 1963). This documentary, shot in 2005, was made by a Dutch filmmaker and deals with Nel and a few of the kind of the people who feature so prominently in his work. Nel himself only speaks through his poems and ballads, but his father Albert, with whom he lives, is a little more communicative. Other individuals also comment – mostly on their own lives – and through them the film provides a perspective on what it is like to live there. None of those interviewed are prominent people, but it is their ordinariness and the evocative cinematography that convey a basic sadness that echoes the writer’s work. At the Netherlands Film Festival in 2006 the film was nominated for two Golden Calf awards, including the one for Best Short Documentary.