MAX and MONA wins an award! Lorelista reviews the scene!
On the weekend that Dv8’s second feature film, MAX and MONA, received its South African mainstream theatrical release through distributor Ster-Kinekor, it also garnered a Best First Time Feature (Prix Oumarou Ganda) award at the FESPACO Film Festival in Ouagadougou – Africa’s premiere Film Festival. This prize goes to the first feature fil…
m by a director whose creative efforts are highly remarkable and deserve encouragements. It is worth 2 million CFA francs (US$4 000).
Thats about R25000.. nice one! So what’s with this sudden streak of Nodding Heads towards our flieks???? Zola Maseko’s Drum, Yesterday and now Max and Mona – Lorelista gives us her take on WINNER SA movies:
Reviewing films is such a subjective craft. I guess the art to following and taking note of reviews is getting to know them and then following the person who wrote it. Ive not found a reviewer yet who I can say thinks like I do.
I think we’re getting past the self hatred and I do like that reviewers dont feel beholden to rave and be overly patriotic about South African films.
I thought both Jump The Gun and Paljas were both accomplished films and could stand next to anything Ive seen anywhere. Til I saw Yesterday I thought Max & Mona was the best thing to come out of South Africa to date. Funny great story, belly laugh funny. Us laughing at ourselves. Loved it in both the audience way and the industry person way. Thought Yesterday was beyond superb, evocative, cinematic poetry, non judgemental, dont know why everyone complained about AIDS message/non message, and to think after reading everything I had heard about it – I almost didnt watch it, I was even less interested in watching it than Forgiveness, which I thought was a contrived messy piece of work with Arnold Vosloo deep to the point of emotional blank, thought they surely couldnt have got worse. As for Yesterday – I saw it and thought “We’ve arrived!”
