Guy Buttery was recently nominated for three SAMAs for Orchestrations — Album of the Year, Best Instrumental and Best Engineered. The album, released last year after 12 years in the making, took shape across a dozen countries, involving different orchestras, string players and musicians along the way. This weekend he returns to the Hilton Arts Festival with multi-instrumentalist Quintin Song.
DIFF26 | From Dust We Spin | dir: Julia Jansch | 85mins
Waaabap-bap-bap. A story as old as time. Sometimes you just want to donut until your tyres come off, and the government won't let you.
Reactionary Reviews | Black Burns Fast | dir: Sandulela Asanda | 95mins
Black Burns Fast gets right into it upfront, announcing and dispensing with setup and exposition in teen rapid-fire dialogue, overcompensating, overstating, and shrugging all at the same time. Self-consciously un-self-conscious. It would be easy to be mean about the overacting teens, but you know what? Teens overact irl.
From Mel Gibson to Jason Statham, the Afrikaner villain has long been a trope in Hollywood cinema, but after Elon Musk saying distinctly Bond Villain type things in that accent, it's no longer just Auret, Vosloo and Copley getting punched in the face, international stars are starting to get in on the act.
DIFF26 | Who Is Still Alive (2025) | Nicolas Wadimoff | 1h 53m
There are no statistics here. There are no images of bombed-out buildings. No before-and-after satellite images of devastation. No discussions of political actors. These are nine people in a blacked-out studio talking of their love for Gaza, the land, the music, the people. Wadimoff resists the familiar grammar, and while the film sometimes grapples for imagery, the cumulative effect is human.
DIFF26 | Dance With Me (2025) | Dir: Romanuse Langa | 79 min
Dance With Me hits all the story beats but does not convincingly portray a universe with an interior life. The world feels inhabited. The cinematography is excellent. The premise is solid, a new take on the disgruntled teenager finding herself, this time through gumboot dancing. But the staging is uniformly awkward. Many of the plot points arrive without any sort of dramatic logic. The film happens because the script is written.
DIFF26 | Themba | dir: Luthando Mngomezulu | 62mins
SC6 | Friday 24 July | 8pm
People grieve differently. This is the premise of Mngomezulu’s Themba. The entire film is two people grieving differently, and misunderstanding each other’s grief. There is little plot business.
bios at the Durban International Film Festival 2026
A rolling index of bios reviews, interviews, essays and festival notes from DIFF 2026.
This page will be updated throughout the festival.
In Hyènes, Djibril Diop Mambéty's 1992 masterpiece, a wealthy woman returns to her impoverished village offering unimaginable wealth on one condition: kill Dramaan Drameh, the local shopkeeper who betrayed her as a girl. No one wants to kill the man, but the presumption that someone will sparks off a wave of money lending, conspicuous spending, and deal making, until many of the villagers owe others for goods, credit, and favours, making the outcome inevitable.
an interview with Eldon van Aswegen, director of FOSTA
FOSTA follows both the story of DJ Fosta and Bridges For Music, from Fosta's time in prison to his discovery of Bridges, playing at Glastonbury, and building the Bridges For Music School in Langa. Along the way it takes in Fosta's musical legacy, embedded in the jazz traditions of Langa.
Following our review, van Aswegen talks to us, via email, about the film's journey to screen.