Award-winning SA film opens the 3rd Commonwealth Film Festival

The third annual festival will open with a special gala celebration of 10 years of free filmmaking in South Africa and 10 years since the fall of apartheid. This event will be co-hosted by the South African High Commission and held at the Manchester Town Hall immediately after the UK Premiere of Ntshaveni Wa Luruli's, "The Wooden Camera" (winner of the 'Glass Bear' at the Berlin International Film Festival). Set in the township of Kayelitsha, after the end of Apartheid, "The Wooden Camera" charts the friendship between two teenagers as one becomes a filmmaker and the other a gangster.
 
This opening event is just one of a host of African films showing at this year's festival. This year the festival will host the European Premiere of Jason's Xenopoulos' new film, Critical Assignment, hailed as the first million dollar pan-African action thriller.
 
The festival will also host the European premiere of "Soldiers of the Rock". Produced by fourth year students of AFDA, the South African school of motion picture, it is a film inspired by the true story of a fatal rock-burst at the Harmony Gold Mine in the Orange Free State, and the subsequent heroism in the rescue of its survivors. "Soldiers" is a movie which takes place in the deepest, darkest, hottest and most dangerous underground mine in the world.
 
The festival is also marking the recent explosion of low-budget genre filmmaking in Nigeria, with a talk and special screening of the documentary film: Nigerian Cinema: Pioneers and Practitioners. The talk will be given by Fidelis Duker, the director of the Abuja International Film Festival.
 
Other highlights include "Proteus", the first gay-themed feature from South Africa; the International premiere of "Roots Calling", a feature-length documentary about musicians who fled South Africa during the Apartheid years; and "Taarab, An Ocean of Melodies", a co-production between Tanzania, Somalia and South Africa, documenting the music of the Dhow region.

There will also be a host of new African short films screening in this year's expanded shorts programme: Gerad Desire Nguele's "Second Class" (Cameroon),  Harold Holscher's "iBali", Lois Du Toit's "When Tomorrow Calls", Petro-Nelise Trichardt's "The Woman with 27 Children", and Anthony Silverstone's "The Slipper Cycle" (all South African).
 
For a full list of African films showing at this year's festival go to www.commonwealthfilm.co.uk.