Two preview screenings in Stellenbosch during the Toyota US Woordfees will offer audiences a first look at a ground breaking new feature-length film currently being shot in the Western Cape.
Speak Me A Speech, the new film from Cape Town’s CineSouth Studios and produced in association with Wits University’s Tsikinya-Chaka Centre, is still in production, with shooting scheduled to continue to the end of 2024.
The 42-minute preview created by director Victor van Aswegen for the festival from material filmed for the project to date gives a foretaste of the film that will be released only in 2025.
The festival screenings are a rare opportunity for the public to get an early look into a forthcoming feature-length work still in production and meet the people behind the project. The Woordfees preview screenings, sponsored by EasyEquities, will start at 14:00 on Tuesday 10 and Friday 13 October at the Neelsie Cinema. It will be followed by a question-and-answer session with the director and producers Chris Thurman and Van Aswegen.
“With this project we are bringing to life an astonishing 28 Shakespeare characters in 10 South African languages through 35 iconic monologues,” Van Aswegen explained. “But more than that, we are also presenting these characters reimagined as inhabitants of the modern-day world, speaking to us in a natural, colloquial, conversational style as contemporaries.
“And what they’re articulating are timeless human concerns – as pertinent to our lives as these were to the lives of the people in Shakespeare’s audiences over four hundred years ago. Transplanted to new and strikingly different contexts, these performances highlight multiple fresh nuances and variations on the familiar. But underlying all variety of history, culture, language and place, and what shines through, is a sense of hard unvarying human fundamentals being laid bare – movingly, pitch-perfectly, enlighteningly. So the project deliberately transcends the colonial past, with which Shakespeare has often been burdened, and speaks across cultural and linguistic boundaries to our common humanity.”
The preview film screened at Woordfees features outstanding performances by Anelisa Phewa, Royston Stoffels, Chantal Stanfield and Buhle Ngaba, bringing to life in isiZulu, Afrikaans and Setswana four unforgettable Shakespeare characters.
The five monologues in the preview film were carefully selected for the satisfyingly wide range of topics, situations and emotions they cover. Old-age mischief-making for love and money, indignation at the receipt of an unwanted advance and eloquent words on the manifold merits of sherry give us Shakespeare in light-hearted mode – in Afrikaans.
All monologues filmed for the project are made publicly available at www.speak-me-a-speech.com, with user-selectable subtitle options (Shakespeare, the South African language being spoken, and the translation into contemporary English of the spoken language), and texts.
