We are delighted to present  photographic works and four new short films by the South African filmmaker and artist Teboho Edkins.

His latest feature length film premiered at the Berlinale in February and the short film Shepherds was recently awarded the First Prize of the Jury of the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (the worldwide leading short film festival founded by Hilmar Hoffmann). In a prison high in the mountains of Lesotho, shepherds sit out draconic sentences for cattle theft.  In this visually compelling, sensitive film, we discern the importance of the animal for the individual and the community. At the same time it shows how the worlds outside and inside the prison merge into one.

The background to the three additional short films (all under 7 minutes) is the far-reaching influence of Chinese settlers in Lesotho. In the course of the film shoot Edkins, his film crew, as well as the small daughter of a Chinese shopkeeper are taken hostage during a brutal robbery on a Chinese supermarket. The attack is captured by the shop’s CCTV camera and now has the effect of a strange theatre piece. This astonishing, self-created film is both highly objective and profoundly personal. In it two major themes that run through Teboho Edkins’ work come to the fore: gangster culture, the experience of brutal violence, and the question of what it means to be a child in today’s society. The latter also dominates the short film The Orphanage.  In a Buddhist orphanage run by Taiwanese missionaries in Lesotho, local children experience an austere discipline. It reveals the at times harsh collision of these two cultures – as does the short music film interlude Machaena.

LESOTHO is a unique film exhibition, in which each film is projected in turns onto one of the three walls, while two stills from the other films frame the piece, almost like photographs.

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