The new Afrikaans film Johnny Is Nie Dood Nie (“Johnny Isn’t
Dead”), the debut directorial feature by theatre director Christiaan Olwagen
about the life and death of queer Afrikaans rock singer and popular cult figure
Johannes Kerkorrel, was released on the 5th of May. In the two-and-a-half weeks
since then it’s been hailed as a landmark feature in South African cinema, and
has garnered much media attention for both its subject – it follows a small
group of rebellious Afrikaner youths in the late 80s and their brief reunion on
a single evening in 2002, and the discussion roves among such topics as the
National Party, PW Botha, apartheid, communism, sexual experimentation, the
Border War, the characters’ place in the new South Africa, and the rejection of
the social and political strictures of Afrikaans conservatism – and the acclaim
it’s garnered. I’ve collected here excerpts from the South African reviews of
the film that I could find.
Click here to read The Back Row’s review of the film.
Click here to read The Back Row’s review of the film.
Reviewing the film for the Beeld, Laetitia Pople – who awarded it
five stars – writes that “you’re drawn in” from the first shots, and that “at
times it feels as though you yourself are in a drug-induced hallucination.”
Olwagen’s
use of long shots places you in the middle of the five friends’ experiences,
then and now. Everything feels real and in the moment. You experience
everything immediately, without a filter, and the tragedy of it wrings your
heart. The archival material and a sober voiceover narration ensures a context
that is true to life. The music of the Voëlvry-beweging (“Outlaw
movement”) on the soundtrack heightens not only the immediacy, but also the
nostalgia of the events. Was Voëlvry the stone that brought down
Goliath? …
Johnny’s
(Roelof Storm) character is an ethereal, lovable being who gets along with
everyone, the resin that keeps the circle together, with whom everyone
instantly falls in love. His presence is girded in a halcyon faintness, as
though he were standing in for the real Kerkorrel. … Johnny Is Nie Dood Nie can steer you to nostalgia if you
experienced that period and want to muse on it again. And in that it’s a
celebration of friendship, the only counterweight to a life in a country that
has been turned on its head.