South African film will be well represented at the festival, with Mandla Dube’s, Kalushi premiering and opening at RapidLion 2016. Sara Bletcher’s Dis Ek Anna and Richard Finn Gregory’s, The Boers at the End of the World – will also be among the South African offerings at the festival.
Cinema from the rest of the African continent will be sure to wow audiences as well. Film lovers cannot miss Timbuktu, a masterfully made film from Mauritania and Independence, an Angolan documentary that shows an intriguing account of the Angolan civil war.
There will be a plethora of films from all over the globe. Drachinzeit - A Rite of Passage is a great documentary from Germany, which shows a community of women who have created a rite of passage to help young girls come through the awkwardness of puberty into the realisation of their own beauty as they say goodbye to childhood and embrace womanhood. Dennis Rodman's Big Bang in Pyongyang is an hilarious account of Dennis Rodman’s (a retired American basketball star player) trip to North Korea.
RapidLion also brings you excellent BRICS cinema. Pechorin is an exquisite adaptation of a classic Russian novel, which is sure to thrill audiences. Bodyguards And Assassins is an amazing Chinese film, which tells the story of an attempt to overthrow the Qing dynasty in 1905. Brazil is also well represented in the festival with a brilliant feature-length film, Trinta, which tells the story of Joaosinho Trinta, the most awarded organiser and creative brain behind some of the most thrilling ever carnival processions in Brazil. India brings 3 Obsessions; a triptych spread over 100 years, with each story exploring one facet of an obsessive relationship.
The short film section is the only one opened up to the entire international community, and RapidLion has created an innovative feature-length experience in this section. Short films will be arranged thematically as dramatic shorts, student, shorts in competition, and comedic shorts. Within these categories, a viewer will watch between four and 11 films for the price and duration of one feature-length film.
To crown the festival, 16 March will feature the staging of the inaugural RapidLion Award Ceremony, where filmmakers in attendance at the festival will win the universe-class RapidLion, an award statue built by RS Owens & Company, the same outfit that makes the Oscar and Emmy awards.
RapidLion tickets will be available at Ticket Pro for as little as R35. The full ticketing price structure is as follows:
