It’s 1994 and young Dudu and Duke have little in the way of inspiring role models to build lives for themselves in Mdantsane, South Africa. Apartheid is over and Nelson Mandela is president, but they’re taking notes from a father (Zolosa Xaluva’s Art Nyakama) raving about how “real men” take care of their family despite cheating on his wife with teenagers and barely knowing what his sons are doing or where they are at any moment. What he means by “protection” is the willingness to steal, cheat, and kill—to prove himself better than the next man trying to follow the law or daring to interfere with what he has ownership over. When escape is only possible through the boxing ring, jail, or death, possessions become identity.
Nobody should then be surprised about where these boys find themselves in 2019 as two halves of the same chip off the old block.
Nobody should then be surprised about where these boys find themselves in 2019 as two halves of the same chip off the old block.
- 9/8/2019
- by Jared Mobarak
- The Film Stage
Wrekin Hill Entertainment - the company that picked up Gallowwalkers, which stars Wesley Snipes, and released it in the USA this summer, has done the same for South African action/drama iNumber Number, directed by Donovan Marsh, which stars Sdumo Mtshali, Presley Chweneyagae, Israel Makoe, Hlubi Mboya, and Owen Sejake. This news comes on the hills of yesterday's news that Universal Pictures has picked up remake rights to the film, with plans to produce an American version, with Chris Morgan (Fast & Furious flicks scribe), and his partner Emile Gladstone, adapting.Both news items come a month after the...
- 10/31/2013
- by Tambay A. Obenson
- ShadowAndAct
A surprising move here by Universal. It's not often that South African films are remade by Hollywood studios. I'll have to research, but this just might be a first, or, at least, a very rare buy. The studio has announced that it picked up the remake rights to the South African action/drama iNumber Number, directed by Donovan Marsh (his third feature directorial effort), which stars Sdumo Mtshali, Presley Chweneyagae, Israel Makoe, Hlubi Mboya, and Owen Sejake. This is a month after the film World Premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it was picked up by Fortissimo Films. The company acquired worldwide distribution...
- 10/30/2013
- by Tambay A. Obenson
- ShadowAndAct
Ahead of its Toronto world premiere, Fortissimo Films has closed an all rights worldwide deal (excluding North America and South Africa) for iNumber Number by writer/director Donovan Marsh.
Xyz handles North America.
iNumber Number, which is local slang for ‘pulling a number,’ is a heist thriller with an ensemble cast led by S’dumo Mtshali, Presley Chweneyagae, Israel Makoe, Owen Sejake, Brandon Auret and Daniel Hadebe.
Indigenous Films will release in South Africa in the first quarter of 2014.
Producers are Harriet Gavshon, Jp Potgieter, Donovan Marsh, Mariki Van Der Walt and executive producers are Harriet Gavshon, Donovan Marsh, Nim Geva, Owen Kessel.
The film shot in Soweto, Johanesburg and Hartbeespoort Dam.
It premieres in Tiff’s Contemporary World Cinema section.
The deal was negotiated between Fortissimo’s Chairman Michael J. Werner and Winnie Lau, Executive Vice President, Sales and Acquisitions with Harriet Gavshon and Donovan Marsh of Quizzical Pictures.
Lau said: “From...
Xyz handles North America.
iNumber Number, which is local slang for ‘pulling a number,’ is a heist thriller with an ensemble cast led by S’dumo Mtshali, Presley Chweneyagae, Israel Makoe, Owen Sejake, Brandon Auret and Daniel Hadebe.
Indigenous Films will release in South Africa in the first quarter of 2014.
Producers are Harriet Gavshon, Jp Potgieter, Donovan Marsh, Mariki Van Der Walt and executive producers are Harriet Gavshon, Donovan Marsh, Nim Geva, Owen Kessel.
The film shot in Soweto, Johanesburg and Hartbeespoort Dam.
It premieres in Tiff’s Contemporary World Cinema section.
The deal was negotiated between Fortissimo’s Chairman Michael J. Werner and Winnie Lau, Executive Vice President, Sales and Acquisitions with Harriet Gavshon and Donovan Marsh of Quizzical Pictures.
Lau said: “From...
- 9/5/2013
- by wendy.mitchell@screendaily.com (Wendy Mitchell)
- ScreenDaily
Fortissimo Films has acquired worldwide rights for South African film iNumber Number, which premieres at Toronto.
Ahead of its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (Tiff), Fortissimo Films has closed an all rights worldwide deal (excluding North America and South Africa) for the South African film iNumber Number,directed by Donovan Marsh.
The heist thriller stars S’dumo Mtshali and Presley Chweneyagae (Tsotsi), Israel Makoe (Tsotsi), Owen Sejake (Tsotsi), Brandon Auret (District 9) and Daniel Hadebe (District 9).
The film is scheduled for release in South Africa in Q1 of 2014 by Indigenous Films.
It is produced by Harriet Gavshon, Jp Potgieter, Donovan Marsh, Mariki Van Der Walt and executive produced by Harriet Gavshon, Donovan Marsh, Nim Geva, Owen Kessel.
Filmed in Soweto, Johanesburg and Hartbeespoort Dam, cinematography was handled by Tom Marais and production design by Chantel Carter.
The film will have its world premiere at the Contemporary World Cinema section at Tiff.
The deal was...
Ahead of its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (Tiff), Fortissimo Films has closed an all rights worldwide deal (excluding North America and South Africa) for the South African film iNumber Number,directed by Donovan Marsh.
The heist thriller stars S’dumo Mtshali and Presley Chweneyagae (Tsotsi), Israel Makoe (Tsotsi), Owen Sejake (Tsotsi), Brandon Auret (District 9) and Daniel Hadebe (District 9).
The film is scheduled for release in South Africa in Q1 of 2014 by Indigenous Films.
It is produced by Harriet Gavshon, Jp Potgieter, Donovan Marsh, Mariki Van Der Walt and executive produced by Harriet Gavshon, Donovan Marsh, Nim Geva, Owen Kessel.
Filmed in Soweto, Johanesburg and Hartbeespoort Dam, cinematography was handled by Tom Marais and production design by Chantel Carter.
The film will have its world premiere at the Contemporary World Cinema section at Tiff.
The deal was...
- 9/5/2013
- by michael.rosser@screendaily.com (Michael Rosser)
- ScreenDaily
Titled iNumber Number, the violent action/drama from South African filmmaker Donovan Marsh (his third feature directorial effort), stars Sdumo Mtshali, Presley Chweneyagae, Israel Makoe, Hlubi Mboya, and Owen Sejake. Here's a synopsis: When Chili Ngcobo, an honest but ambitious undercover cop, is cheated out of a major reward by his corrupt superiors, he infiltrates a cash-in-transit heist gang, and instead of busting them, he decides to participate in a one off score. He must face off against his partner who refuses to let him do it and one of the gang members who recognizes him as a cop. The film is set to make its World Premiere at the Toronto International Film...
- 8/16/2013
- by Tambay A. Obenson
- ShadowAndAct
We have new images as well as trailers from two Regent Releasing films. First up, "Eichmann" is helmed by Robert Young from the screenplay by Snoo Wilson. The film stars Thomas Kretschmann, Troy Garity, Franka Potente and Stephen Fry. "Shake Hands with the Devil" stars Roy Dupuis, Deborah Unger, James Gallanders, Odile Katesi Gakire, Owen Lebakeng Sejake, Michel Mongeau and Jean-Hugues Anglade. The Robert Spottiswoode-helmed film is adapted by Michael Donovan based on the book by Roméo Dallair...
- 11/6/2009
- Upcoming-Movies.com
Screened
Mill Valley Film Festival
MILL VALLEY, Calif. -- South African director David Hickson's "Beat the Drum", a tale of the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, features gorgeous scenery, fantastic cinematography by Lance Gewer and an incredible array of great South African faces. At its world premiere during the Mill Valley Film Festival, audiences were enraptured, which bodes well for its potential boxoffice. The film is in Zulu and English and has the potential for greater success than just the art house circuit. But because of American screenwriter W. David McBrayer's rather banal script, the film doesn't succeed so much as art as it does as propaganda.
It's impossible to deny "Drum"'s emotional power, which is heightened even more by McBrayer's choice to focus the movie on a beatific young boy, Musa (Junior Singo). Musa lives in a Zulu village where he's been orphaned by AIDS. The villagers think his family is cursed, so Musa heads for Johannesburg to earn enough money to buy a cow for his foster grandmother and to find his uncle. He encounters Nobe (Owen Sejake), a truck driver who gives Musa a lift. In Jo'burg, as it's referred to, Musa washes car windshields on the streets, grateful when drivers flip him a few coins.
Meanwhile, Nobe argues with his wife, who wants him to wear a condom and asks if he's been promiscuous. He refuses to discuss it. (We know he's been with prostitutes.) In a third story line, Nobe's white boss, Pieter Botha (Clive Scott), owner of a distribution company, chides his lawyer son (Tom Fairfoot), who's more interested in helping out a local orphanage than in making money at his father's business. When his son is hospitalized with full-blown AIDS, Pieter begins to understand his son's life.
McBrayer is attempting something Dickensian with these multiple intertwining story lines, and you might be reminded of "Oliver Twist". But McBrayer and Hickson have no fury fueling their film
there's a curious lack of malice. The land is so picturesque and Musa is so sweet and preternaturally wise that he never seems in any real danger, despite some menacing from a street tough in Jo'burg. (Singo has an amazing face, and the audience melts when he smiles, but for all that, he has no real technique or skill as an actor.) There's no mention at all of how governmental policies contribute to the problem. (A failure of nerve?) And the film's conclusion comes off as sentimental and naive. Dickens' happy endings were hard-earned.
The AIDS deaths that occur in the movie are abstract and antiseptic. There is no sense of the appalling physical ravages of the disease: The extreme wasting, the disfiguring opportunistic diseases -- it just seems like a bad flu. (Whenever anyone coughs in this movie, we're meant to understand they have AIDS.) And the forces that encourage the spread of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa are all elucidated in the first 15 minutes of the film, so that it feels like a precis of the Time magazine cover article on the subject. This then is the movie's problem: McBrayer and Hickson have made a film about AIDS in Africa, but what they haven't done is people it with compelling, distinctive characters.
BEAT THE DRUM
Z Prods.
Credits:
Director: David Hickson
Screenwriter: W. David McBrayer
Producers: W. David McBrayer, Karen S. Shapiro, Richard Shaw
Director of photography: Lance Gewer
Production designer: Johnny Breedt
Music: Klaus Badelt, Ramin Djawadi
Costume designer: Ruy Filipe
Editor: Mark Winitsky
Cast:
Musa: Junior Singo
Thandi: Dineo Nchabeleng
Nobe: Owen Sejake
Pieter: Clive Scott
Stefan: Tom Fairfoot
Letti: Noluthando Maleka
Running time -- 114 minutes
No MPAA rating...
Mill Valley Film Festival
MILL VALLEY, Calif. -- South African director David Hickson's "Beat the Drum", a tale of the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, features gorgeous scenery, fantastic cinematography by Lance Gewer and an incredible array of great South African faces. At its world premiere during the Mill Valley Film Festival, audiences were enraptured, which bodes well for its potential boxoffice. The film is in Zulu and English and has the potential for greater success than just the art house circuit. But because of American screenwriter W. David McBrayer's rather banal script, the film doesn't succeed so much as art as it does as propaganda.
It's impossible to deny "Drum"'s emotional power, which is heightened even more by McBrayer's choice to focus the movie on a beatific young boy, Musa (Junior Singo). Musa lives in a Zulu village where he's been orphaned by AIDS. The villagers think his family is cursed, so Musa heads for Johannesburg to earn enough money to buy a cow for his foster grandmother and to find his uncle. He encounters Nobe (Owen Sejake), a truck driver who gives Musa a lift. In Jo'burg, as it's referred to, Musa washes car windshields on the streets, grateful when drivers flip him a few coins.
Meanwhile, Nobe argues with his wife, who wants him to wear a condom and asks if he's been promiscuous. He refuses to discuss it. (We know he's been with prostitutes.) In a third story line, Nobe's white boss, Pieter Botha (Clive Scott), owner of a distribution company, chides his lawyer son (Tom Fairfoot), who's more interested in helping out a local orphanage than in making money at his father's business. When his son is hospitalized with full-blown AIDS, Pieter begins to understand his son's life.
McBrayer is attempting something Dickensian with these multiple intertwining story lines, and you might be reminded of "Oliver Twist". But McBrayer and Hickson have no fury fueling their film
there's a curious lack of malice. The land is so picturesque and Musa is so sweet and preternaturally wise that he never seems in any real danger, despite some menacing from a street tough in Jo'burg. (Singo has an amazing face, and the audience melts when he smiles, but for all that, he has no real technique or skill as an actor.) There's no mention at all of how governmental policies contribute to the problem. (A failure of nerve?) And the film's conclusion comes off as sentimental and naive. Dickens' happy endings were hard-earned.
The AIDS deaths that occur in the movie are abstract and antiseptic. There is no sense of the appalling physical ravages of the disease: The extreme wasting, the disfiguring opportunistic diseases -- it just seems like a bad flu. (Whenever anyone coughs in this movie, we're meant to understand they have AIDS.) And the forces that encourage the spread of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa are all elucidated in the first 15 minutes of the film, so that it feels like a precis of the Time magazine cover article on the subject. This then is the movie's problem: McBrayer and Hickson have made a film about AIDS in Africa, but what they haven't done is people it with compelling, distinctive characters.
BEAT THE DRUM
Z Prods.
Credits:
Director: David Hickson
Screenwriter: W. David McBrayer
Producers: W. David McBrayer, Karen S. Shapiro, Richard Shaw
Director of photography: Lance Gewer
Production designer: Johnny Breedt
Music: Klaus Badelt, Ramin Djawadi
Costume designer: Ruy Filipe
Editor: Mark Winitsky
Cast:
Musa: Junior Singo
Thandi: Dineo Nchabeleng
Nobe: Owen Sejake
Pieter: Clive Scott
Stefan: Tom Fairfoot
Letti: Noluthando Maleka
Running time -- 114 minutes
No MPAA rating...
Screened
Mill Valley Film Festival
MILL VALLEY, Calif. -- South African director David Hickson's "Beat the Drum", a tale of the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, features gorgeous scenery, fantastic cinematography by Lance Gewer and an incredible array of great South African faces. At its world premiere during the Mill Valley Film Festival, audiences were enraptured, which bodes well for its potential boxoffice. The film is in Zulu and English and has the potential for greater success than just the art house circuit. But because of American screenwriter W. David McBrayer's rather banal script, the film doesn't succeed so much as art as it does as propaganda.
It's impossible to deny "Drum"'s emotional power, which is heightened even more by McBrayer's choice to focus the movie on a beatific young boy, Musa (Junior Singo). Musa lives in a Zulu village where he's been orphaned by AIDS. The villagers think his family is cursed, so Musa heads for Johannesburg to earn enough money to buy a cow for his foster grandmother and to find his uncle. He encounters Nobe (Owen Sejake), a truck driver who gives Musa a lift. In Jo'burg, as it's referred to, Musa washes car windshields on the streets, grateful when drivers flip him a few coins.
Meanwhile, Nobe argues with his wife, who wants him to wear a condom and asks if he's been promiscuous. He refuses to discuss it. (We know he's been with prostitutes.) In a third story line, Nobe's white boss, Pieter Botha (Clive Scott), owner of a distribution company, chides his lawyer son (Tom Fairfoot), who's more interested in helping out a local orphanage than in making money at his father's business. When his son is hospitalized with full-blown AIDS, Pieter begins to understand his son's life.
McBrayer is attempting something Dickensian with these multiple intertwining story lines, and you might be reminded of "Oliver Twist". But McBrayer and Hickson have no fury fueling their film
there's a curious lack of malice. The land is so picturesque and Musa is so sweet and preternaturally wise that he never seems in any real danger, despite some menacing from a street tough in Jo'burg. (Singo has an amazing face, and the audience melts when he smiles, but for all that, he has no real technique or skill as an actor.) There's no mention at all of how governmental policies contribute to the problem. (A failure of nerve?) And the film's conclusion comes off as sentimental and naive. Dickens' happy endings were hard-earned.
The AIDS deaths that occur in the movie are abstract and antiseptic. There is no sense of the appalling physical ravages of the disease: The extreme wasting, the disfiguring opportunistic diseases -- it just seems like a bad flu. (Whenever anyone coughs in this movie, we're meant to understand they have AIDS.) And the forces that encourage the spread of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa are all elucidated in the first 15 minutes of the film, so that it feels like a precis of the Time magazine cover article on the subject. This then is the movie's problem: McBrayer and Hickson have made a film about AIDS in Africa, but what they haven't done is people it with compelling, distinctive characters.
BEAT THE DRUM
Z Prods.
Credits:
Director: David Hickson
Screenwriter: W. David McBrayer
Producers: W. David McBrayer, Karen S. Shapiro, Richard Shaw
Director of photography: Lance Gewer
Production designer: Johnny Breedt
Music: Klaus Badelt, Ramin Djawadi
Costume designer: Ruy Filipe
Editor: Mark Winitsky
Cast:
Musa: Junior Singo
Thandi: Dineo Nchabeleng
Nobe: Owen Sejake
Pieter: Clive Scott
Stefan: Tom Fairfoot
Letti: Noluthando Maleka
Running time -- 114 minutes
No MPAA rating...
Mill Valley Film Festival
MILL VALLEY, Calif. -- South African director David Hickson's "Beat the Drum", a tale of the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, features gorgeous scenery, fantastic cinematography by Lance Gewer and an incredible array of great South African faces. At its world premiere during the Mill Valley Film Festival, audiences were enraptured, which bodes well for its potential boxoffice. The film is in Zulu and English and has the potential for greater success than just the art house circuit. But because of American screenwriter W. David McBrayer's rather banal script, the film doesn't succeed so much as art as it does as propaganda.
It's impossible to deny "Drum"'s emotional power, which is heightened even more by McBrayer's choice to focus the movie on a beatific young boy, Musa (Junior Singo). Musa lives in a Zulu village where he's been orphaned by AIDS. The villagers think his family is cursed, so Musa heads for Johannesburg to earn enough money to buy a cow for his foster grandmother and to find his uncle. He encounters Nobe (Owen Sejake), a truck driver who gives Musa a lift. In Jo'burg, as it's referred to, Musa washes car windshields on the streets, grateful when drivers flip him a few coins.
Meanwhile, Nobe argues with his wife, who wants him to wear a condom and asks if he's been promiscuous. He refuses to discuss it. (We know he's been with prostitutes.) In a third story line, Nobe's white boss, Pieter Botha (Clive Scott), owner of a distribution company, chides his lawyer son (Tom Fairfoot), who's more interested in helping out a local orphanage than in making money at his father's business. When his son is hospitalized with full-blown AIDS, Pieter begins to understand his son's life.
McBrayer is attempting something Dickensian with these multiple intertwining story lines, and you might be reminded of "Oliver Twist". But McBrayer and Hickson have no fury fueling their film
there's a curious lack of malice. The land is so picturesque and Musa is so sweet and preternaturally wise that he never seems in any real danger, despite some menacing from a street tough in Jo'burg. (Singo has an amazing face, and the audience melts when he smiles, but for all that, he has no real technique or skill as an actor.) There's no mention at all of how governmental policies contribute to the problem. (A failure of nerve?) And the film's conclusion comes off as sentimental and naive. Dickens' happy endings were hard-earned.
The AIDS deaths that occur in the movie are abstract and antiseptic. There is no sense of the appalling physical ravages of the disease: The extreme wasting, the disfiguring opportunistic diseases -- it just seems like a bad flu. (Whenever anyone coughs in this movie, we're meant to understand they have AIDS.) And the forces that encourage the spread of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa are all elucidated in the first 15 minutes of the film, so that it feels like a precis of the Time magazine cover article on the subject. This then is the movie's problem: McBrayer and Hickson have made a film about AIDS in Africa, but what they haven't done is people it with compelling, distinctive characters.
BEAT THE DRUM
Z Prods.
Credits:
Director: David Hickson
Screenwriter: W. David McBrayer
Producers: W. David McBrayer, Karen S. Shapiro, Richard Shaw
Director of photography: Lance Gewer
Production designer: Johnny Breedt
Music: Klaus Badelt, Ramin Djawadi
Costume designer: Ruy Filipe
Editor: Mark Winitsky
Cast:
Musa: Junior Singo
Thandi: Dineo Nchabeleng
Nobe: Owen Sejake
Pieter: Clive Scott
Stefan: Tom Fairfoot
Letti: Noluthando Maleka
Running time -- 114 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 11/12/2003
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
IMDb.com, Inc. takes no responsibility for the content or accuracy of the above news articles, Tweets, or blog posts. This content is published for the entertainment of our users only. The news articles, Tweets, and blog posts do not represent IMDb's opinions nor can we guarantee that the reporting therein is completely factual. Please visit the source responsible for the item in question to report any concerns you may have regarding content or accuracy.