#OnTheBigScreen: The Ellen Pakkies Story, a demonic nun, and a black klansman

Ellen: The Ellen Pakkies Story 

Based on true events, Ellen: The Ellen Pakkies Story tells of the troubled relationship between a mother and her drug-addicted son – a relationship that eventually drove her to the edge and led to his murder.

Amy Jephta on writing the screenplay for Ellen: The Ellen Pakkies Story

Daniel Dercksen  6 Sep 2018

Director Daryne Joshua, best-known for his successful debut film Noem My Skollie, alongside producers Schalk-Willem Burger and Paulo Areal, is at the helm of this impressive project. The script was crafted by Amy Jephta, with input from Ellen Pakkies herself. Pakkies also helped recreate scenes for the movie, which was shot in her home, to ensure that they are as authentic as possible.

Jill Levenberg, who has played several parts in films and on television - including Genadekans, Noem my Skollie, Leemte, While You Weren’t Looking, Abraham, Bekkies Gevind, As Ek Huistoe Kom, Fluit-Fluit, Atlas, Uitvlucht and the popular kykNET soapie Suidooster - is brilliant in the role of Ellen Pakkies and did a lot of research to make her interpretation as honest and accurate as possible.

Blackkklansman

Nearly three decades after releasing that masterpiece Do the Right Thing, visionary filmmaker Spike Lee’s latest expression of the facts of American life, BlacKkKlansman, which was awarded the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, is the true story of Ron Stallworth, the first black detective in the Colorado Springs police force who, in 1978, went undercover with the Ku Klux Klan.

It’s the early 1970s, and Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) is the first African-American detective to serve in the Colorado Springs Police Department. Determined to make a name for himself, Stallworth bravely sets out on a dangerous mission: infiltrate and expose the Ku Klux Klan. The young detective soon recruits a more seasoned colleague, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), into the undercover investigation of a lifetime.

Together, they team up to take down the extremist hate group as the organisation aims to sanitise its violent rhetoric to appeal to the mainstream.

Spike Lee directs from a screenplay based on the book Black Klansman by Ron Stallworth. Produced by the team behind the Academy-Award winning Get Out. Screenplay by Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, Spike Lee, Kevin Willmott.

Mile 22

Set in the volatile arenas of intelligence and global politics, director Peter Berg ushers in a new wave of modern combat cinema which follows an elite paramilitary team who embark on an urgent mission to transport a foreign intelligence asset from an American Embassy in Southeast Asia to an airfield for extraction — a distance of 22 miles.

This asset possesses highly classified information, which could avert terrorist attacks of catastrophic proportions, and this team must race against time and through a gauntlet in enemy territory, as the city’s military, police, and street gangs close in, determined to reclaim the asset.

It explores the complicated dynamic between Mark Wahlberg and Lauren Cohan as veteran members of the CIA’s most highly prized and most closely-guarded secret operatives.

The Nun

The unholy evil in holy guise is back in the latest chapter stemming from James Wan’s Conjuring universe, with an entire film dedicated to the origin of her horrifying visage.

When a young nun at a cloistered abbey in Romania takes her own life, a priest with a haunted past and a novitiate on the threshold of her final vows are sent by the Vatican to investigate.  Together they uncover the order’s unholy secret.  Risking not only their lives but their faith and their very souls, they confront a malevolent force in the form of a nun, as the abbey becomes a horrific battleground between the living and the damned.

The new fright-fest, directed by Corin Hardy and produced by Wan, and Peter Safran, the latter of whom has produced all the films in The Conjuring franchise, delves into the shocking origin of the demonic Nun Valak, who first made her evil presence known in The Conjuring 2. Hardy directed The Nun from a screenplay by Gary Dauberman from a story by Wan and Dauberman.

In The Nun, the epic battle of good vs evil pits a priest with a dark history and a novitiate whose own past isn’t the only thing that haunts her against the blasphemy that is the Demon Nun.