Canada and South Africa / 2012 / 85mins / Documentary / English

The directors and a team of local filmmakers spent a single day following five distinct characters, creating a portrait of a community pulsing with life. The result is an astonishing work that stands as a fluid exploration of the complex and fascinating spectrum of South African society.

Arya Lalloo

Born in 1980 in South Africa, Arya Lalloo is an independent filmmaker of mixed heritage based in Johannesburg. She has written and directed documentaries for South African broadcast as well as the outreach documentary Citizen X, which explored the reactions of social movements to xenophobic violence in peri-urban townships. More recent work includes writing and directing on Alexandra! My Alexandra, a historical documentary series about the famous township of the same name, and the feature documentary Jeppe on a Friday (co-directed with Shannon Walsh) that paints an intimate and sensory portrait of life in a regenerating Johannesburg neighborhood. Arya is broadly interested in urban identities and social histories in post-apartheid South Africa and beyond. Much of her work is driven by a need to identify and provoke popular misperceptions and misrepresentations of contemporary urban African experience, by exploring, reimagining and celebrating these often-invisible identities and histories. Learn More

Shannon Walsh

Shannon Walsh is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of British Columbia. She is writer and director of the feature documentaries Illusions of Control (2019), Jeppe on a Friday (2013), St-Henri, the 26th of August (2011), and H2Oil (2009). Her first short non-fiction 360 VR, Disappearance: Hong Kong Stories, premiered at RIDM in 2018. In 2018, her first fiction feature script, Unidentified Minor, was a top ten finalist in the Cinequest Screenplay Competition. Walsh’s films have been theatrically released in Canada, the UK, and South Africa, and played in over 60 film festivals worldwide such as Hot Docs, Visions du Réel, Beijing, La Rochelle, Rome, Paris Cinéma, Durban, Bergen and others. Her documentaries have been broadcast nationally and internationally. Learn More