Make way for Steven Spielberg back on science fiction turf. Evidently no other international movie wants to open against the latest blockbuster from the Close Encounters of the Third Kind, War of the Worlds, and E.T. filmmaker.
Before we learn more, we need to mention the more niche offerings at South African cinemas as of this Friday. Look out for Bollywood partitian era romance Main Vaapas Aaunga; the BTS World Tour ‘Arirang’ In Busan: Live Viewing (on Saturday, 13 June only!); a recording of opera El Último Sueño De Frida Y Diego; and the Throwback return of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.
“If you found out we weren’t alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you, would that frighten you? This summer, the truth belongs to eight billion people. We are coming close to … Disclosure Day.” Props to the Disclosure Day marketing team for keeping the plot of Spielberg’s new sci-fi actioner under wraps. Even the trailer below refuses to spell things out. What we do know, and can say, is that Emily Blunt’s TV meteorologist finds herself on the run with Josh O’Connor’s cybersecurity expert and whistleblower. It falls on them to disclose the truth about extra-terrestrial presence on earth, which Colin Firth’s character refuses to let happen.
No doubt timed to coincide with the Youth Day public holiday next week is South African drama Studying Under the Barrel of a Gun – produced and directed by Tebogo Malope (Outlaws, Queen Sono, and Rise: The Siya Kolisi Story). Set in the late 1980s at the University of the North (Turfloop) in Limpopo, the film follows the resistance efforts of students operating under brutal Apartheid era military occupation. Faced with political suppression, raids, arrest and solitary confinement, a united student movement goes underground, and deploys strategy, faith networks, mass mobilization, and psychological warfare, rather than armed confrontation, to achieve change.