Dolly Rathebe Movies

Arguably the premiere African female vocalist of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, Dolly Rathebe justly wrought comparisons to Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington. She emerged as a star under the threatening and subjugating shadow of apartheid, which inspired her to begin a crusade for social justice alongside her career in song. In 2004, Rathebe netted the coveted Order of Ikhamanga in Silver for both her social efforts and cultural contributions made through her music. Travels with Dolly constitutes neither a performance film nor a biographical portrait of Rathebe, but instead a filmed record of an event that transpired in 1998, when documentarist Peter Davis took Rathebe to Vancouver for a festival of black African films from the 1950s. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide

Friendship, politics, violence, and personal responsibility meet head on in this drama. In the late 1980s, three young women who are completing their college education share a house together in Johannesburg, South Africa. Aninka (Michele Burgers) is the daughter of wealthy Afrikaners; she is studying archeology and has personally rejected her family's pro-apartheid politics. Thoko (Dambisa Kente) is Black and receiving a degree in education; her family has little money, and her mother works as a cleaning woman to help pay her daughter's tuition. Sophie (Kerry Fox), whose British parents are well-to-do, is studying library science, and unknown to the others, she has taken a very strong position against South Africa's policy of minority rule. Sophie has joined a terrorist group determined to fight apartheid by any means necessary; under orders from the group, she places a bomb at a busy airport in Johannesburg, killing many innocent bystanders in the process. Sophie's confusion and guilt over the consequences of her actions drive a wedge between herself and her husband, a fellow activist, and it complicates her friendship with Aninka and Thoko. Writer-director Elaine Proctor won the Golden Camera award at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival for her work on Friends. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

The Magic Garden is the US title for the South African film Pennywhistle Blues. An all-black, nonprofessional cast appears in this compact little drama, set in the town of Alexandria. The garden of the title is the hiding place chosen by a thief who has stolen a large sum of money from the local church. The owner of the garden is a poverty-stricken widow--exactly the sort of person for whom the money had been donated. The widow finds the money and uses it to pay off a grocery debt. The thief steals the money again, whereupon it passes into the hands of a young man who pays off his sweetheart's father's debts. The money ends up back in the church, but the thief plans to steal it once more...and we are encouraged to assume that the ill-gotten gains will once more do the good for which it was intended. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide