Film guru and lecturer at the Department of Visual Communication’s Film programme, Dr Anna-Marie Jansen van Vuuren. Photo: Courtesy of RSG (SABC).
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Dr Jansen van Vuuren says since its premiere at the 2019 Venice International Film Festival, the film on which the article is based, This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection, has been touring the world’s film festivals. “Everywhere it goes it attracts critical praise and awards – over 25 of them now. At the Sundance Film Festival, it won a special jury award for visionary filmmaking for its Director, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese. It is the first Lesotho film ever to have been included in the foreign-language category or Best Foreign Film category of the Academy Awards,” she adds.
Dr Jansen van Vuuren is an emerging researcher in the field of South African Cinema, with a keen interest in historical films, myth, and Afrikaner identity.
She completed her practice-led PhD in Creative Writing, Screenwriting and Film Studies at the University of Pretoria, supervised by Hertzog-prize winner, Professor Henning Pieterse. It consisted of writing a feature film screenplay, whilst her thesis centred on the ideological representation of the hero in South African Anglo-Boer War case studies.
Her current research includes the history of South African cinema; the role of representation and ideology within South African Film identities; and the role of landscape in film.
She is also a film critic and for the latter has won two ATKV-Mediaveertjie awards in the category Best insert for a radio journal and current affairs show. In 2014, she headed up the jury for the Independent Mzanzi Film Festival in Pretoria, in 2017, she formed part of the jury for the Cape Town International Film Festival, and is a full member of the Writers' Guild of South Africa (WGSA).