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Dance on the red-brown earth
(University of the Western Cape, 2020) Conradie, Ina; Vandermerwe, Meg
Nandi, Java and Uuka are students at a Cape Town university, where they are enrolled in a film making course. Adela, their lecturer, will supervise their screenplay and film on a story which depicts the experience of the loss of land in South Africa. They are however also deeply involved in student protests for free university education for all. When the #feesmustfall protests reach a deadlock at their university and the university is temporarily closed, they decide to leave for the Eastern Cape to look for a story. There they stay with Uuka’s grandparents and spend their time trying to understand the family history and the family’s ownership of land, as well as the broader history of land dispossession. They do not only discover more about Uuka’s ancestors and about distant history, but also about themselves. As the characters delve more deeply into the past in their search for a story for a screenplay, the margins between their own stories and the screenplay shift and merge, as do the forms of novel and screenplay