Sea Point Days continues festival success

SEA POINT DAYS, a feature-length documentary film directed by local Emmy-award winning filmmaker Francois Verster has been selected for the Sterling World Feature Competition at the prestigious SilverDocs Film Festival. The festival is hosted by the American Film Institute and the Discovery Channel in Washington DC later this month. The film has also been nominated for the festival’s coveted Cinematic Vision Award, and festival programmers have described the film as being “amongst the very best the documentary form has to offer”.

The film, produced by Lucinda Englehart and Neil Brandt, looks at life at Cape Town’s Sea Point promenade and municipal pools. SEA POINT DAYS not only celebrates this unusual and beautiful space, but also paints a reflective picture of old white South Africa in transition and the frictions of a society in flux. It appeared on more than one “top ten of the fest” lists at the Toronto International Film Festival last year where it had its world premiere. At Doc NZ where it won Best Editing prize in February, the jury described the film as ‘a cinematic, memorable and seamless film’. This week Sea Point Days was awarded a Special Mention at the 6th Tarifa African Film Festival.

Other recent and future screenings, many of which are in competition, include Planete Doc Review in Warsaw, the One World Human Rights Film Festival in Prague, Cines del Sur in Granada, the Munich International Film Festival, the Guth Gafa Documentary Film Festival, the Adelaide Big Pond Film Festival, the Jerusalem International Film Festival and the Dockanema Film Festival. The film will have its South African premiere at the Encounters Film Festival in early July, and will also be showing at the Durban International Film Festival in late July.

SEA POINT DAYS was funded by ITVS International, the Jan Vrijman Fund, Visions Sud Est, the National Film and Video Foundation and Spier Films.