The Suit off to Chicago

27 June, 2017 - 08:01

Award-winning short film The Suit, directed by Jarryd Coetsee and based on the classic story by Can Themba, has been selected for the 23rd Black Harvest Film Festival in Chicago. The film is thus eligible for the Best of the Festival Audience Award. The Black Harvest Film Festival is Chicagos annual showcase for films that tell stories, raise questions, or touch on issues that relate to the black, African, African American, and African diasporic experience.

The Suit focuses on an aspiring black lawyer named Philemon, played by Atandwa Kani, and his wife Matilda, played by Phuthi Nakene, whose marriage unravels in the midst of the apartheid regime's forced removals in 1950s Sophiatown. Tony Award-winner John Kani plays the township gossip who reveals to Philemon that Matilda has been having an affair with a younger man. When Philemon catches her in flagrant, he forces Matilda to treat her lover's suit as if it were a person. She must serve it meals, take it for walks around the neighbourhood and even to church. As Philemon's cruel punishment intensifies, Matilda is faced with an ever-dwindling number of choices which lead to a tragic climax. The Suit was produced by Luke Sharland of Mandala Films in association with the National Film and Video Foundation and a partnership with AFDA.

The Gene Siskel Film Center selects and presents significant world cinema in a non-commercial context that sets aesthetic, critical and entertainment standards. To this end, the GSFC exhibits a range of carefully curated film art in technically excellent facilities, and educates the audience, setting film in an historical and cultural context through courses, lectures, panel discussions, and publications, and through research and collections. As an integral part of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the GSFC further enhances the educational mission of the school and promotes a dialogue between disciplines.

Since 1972, the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago has presented cutting edge cinema to an annual audience of 80,000. The Film Center's programming includes annual film festivals that celebrate diverse voices and international cultures, premieres of trailblazing work by today's independent filmmakers, restorations and revivals of essential films from cinema history, and insightful, provocative discussions with filmmakers and media artists. Altogether, the Film Center hosts over 1,500 screenings and 100 filmmaker appearances every year. The Film Center was renamed the Gene Siskel Film Center in 2000 after the late, nationally celebrated film critic, Gene Siskel.

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The Suit was selected in competition at two Oscar-qualifying film festivals: Urbanworld in New York City and the Pan-African Film Festival in Los Angeles where it received a Special Mention. It won the Best Short Film competition of the Scotland African Film Festival (AiM) in Glasgow and Edinburgh, as well as the Audience Award of the Cape Town leg of the Switzerland-based Shnit International Short Film Festival. The film was also selected by the Acad mie des C sar (France's national academy of cinema which gives France's highest honour for film, the C sar Award) for its prestigious Les Nuits en Or (Golden Nights) event which saw the film screened in nine European capitals (Paris, Rome, Athens, Madrid, Stockholm, Lisbon, Vienna, Brussels and Luxembourg), 24 cities and towns across France and a gala evening hosted by UNESCO in Paris and attended by France's leading actors and film-makers.

The film was also shown at the Zanzibar International Film Festival where it was given a Special Mention, the Schomburg Center's Best Of film series and the New Voices in Black Cinema Film Festival both in New York City, the Toronto Black Film Festival, the Vancouver-South African Film Festival, the Red Bull Amaphiko Film Festival (in Soweto), the Durban International Film Festival and it opened the Mauritius International Short Film Festival. The film screened in nineteen different cities in Belgium as part of the Leuven African Film Festival and will screen at the iAfrica Film Festival in Leiden and The Hague as well.

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