There are several cinematic treasures from the country that gave us Neill Blomkamp, Gavin Hood and Charlize Theron

South Africa is synonymous with Nelson Mandela, is a great tourist destination, and, unfortunately, has a top-ranked cricket team that chokes in ICC tournaments — their abject surrender to India in the 2017 Champions Trophy being a case in point. However, the country also has a rich filmmaking tradition. I was first exposed to South African cinema back in 1980 when Jamie Uys’ The Gods Must Be Crazy exploded on to the international scene. The surreal comedy about what happens to a community of Bushmen when a Coke bottle lands from the sky firmly put South African cinema on the world map. Inevitably, a sequel followed in 1989 and, surprisingly, it was superior to its predecessor, though it may have not had the same impact.

Joziwood, as the Johannesburg-based South African film industry is popularly known, has been around since the 1910s. Early examples include historical dramas Winning The Continent (1916) by Harold M Shaw, and Dick Cruikshanks’ The Symbol Of Sacrifice (1918). The two Anglo-Boer wars (1880 and 1900) are watersheds in South African history and the Afrikaans-language folk song, ‘Sarie Marais’, came into prominence during that time. The first Afrikaans-language sound film, Joseph Albrecht’s Sarie Marais (1931), is set in a British prisoner of war camp where Boer prisoners find succour in the song.

Apartheid remains a shameful chapter in South African and world history, and has been well documented in cinema. A tireless South African celluloid chronicler of apartheid is Darrell Roodt in films like Place of Weeping (1986), Sarafina! (1992), and Cry, The Beloved Country (1995). Neill Blomkamp is perhaps the most internationally visible contemporary South African filmmaker and he burst on to the global firmament with the brilliant District 9 (2009) that is ostensibly a science fiction film, but is in reality a thinly-veiled allegory on apartheid. His Elysium (2013), starring Jodie Foster and Matt Damon, was also a variation on the theme, but was altogether less successful. Gray Hofmeyr’s There’s A Zulu On My Stoep (1993) tackled the issue from a humorous point of view and was all the more effective for it. There is, of course, Richard Attenborough’s Cry Freedom (1987) and the numerous Mandela biopics, and several more on the subject.

A few years before District 9, the South African film that fired the global imagination was Gavin Hood’s gritty Tsotsi (2005), which detailed six days in the turbulent life of a very young Johannesburg gangster. The film vividly captured the city’s underbelly and won the Oscar for best foreign language film the following year, and Hood is now a prominent Hollywood director with films like X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) and Eye In The Sky (2015) under his belt.

South Africa has also contributed a host of fine actors to the world. Basil Rathbone, who made Sherlock Holmes his own from 1939 to 1953, was born in Johannesburg. But the most luminous of them all is surely Charlize Theron, who parlayed a modelling career into an acting one, and won best actress for Patty Jenkins’ (yes, the director of Wonder Woman) Monster (2003).