New York screening for Kaganof docu
Wed, 05 Sep 2007
African Noise Foundation has announced the selection of the South African documentary Unyazi of the Bushveld for screening in the prestigious Columbia University Columbia Harlem Festival of Global Jazz Documentary Film. The 45 minute documentary is directed by Aryan Kaganof.
The Zulu word “unyazi” can be translated into English as “lightning,” an apposite double image of rupture and new beginnings for UNYAZI 2005, Africa’s first festival of electronic music, the brainchild of new music composer Dimitri Voudouris. Kaganof’s documentary on this singular historical event is suitably non-linear in structure, as it explores the complex relationship, both assumed and actual, among technology, the African and Afrodiasporic worlds, and the multiculturalism that mediates them.
Professor George Lewis explains the essence of the documentary thus: “We are presented with a vision freed from the romantically anti-technological stances of the early N’gritude movement (and that of 1960s American black cultural nationalisms), and the concomitant assumptions that nothing of a technological nature can emerge from a black-ruled world. But we are never far from South Africa’s recent history. Until 2005, jazz drummer Louis Moholo, exiled since the early 1960s, had never been on the campus of Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand — or rather, as he commented drily, ‘We came, but they chased us off with dogs. That was 1962’.”
this article first appeared on screenafrica.com
UNYAZI OF THE BUSHVELD
South Africa - 2007
Direction: Aryan Kaganof
Camera: Thembeka Laduma
Editing: C. R. Mandala
Sound design: Joel Assaizky
sound recordist: JA Assagai
Music: Zim Ngqawana, Luc Houtkamp, Lukas Ligeti, Matthew Ostrowski etc
Cast: George Lewis, Pauline Oliveros, Halim El-Dabh, Francisco Lopez etc
Format: Video
Time: 45 min.
Original Version: Inglese
Production: African Noise Foundation
Sales: kaganof@mweb.co.za
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