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The Silver Fez

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2009 South African film
The Silver Fez
DVD cover
Directed byLloyd Ross
Screenplay byRian Malan
Produced byJoëlle Chesselet
CinematographyLloyd Ross
Edited byLloyd Ross
Music byWarrick Sony
Release date
  • 2009 (2009)
Running time83 minutes
CountrySouth Africa

The Silver Fez is a 2009 South African documentary feature film directed by Lloyd Ross.

Synopsis

The story tells of Kaatji Davids, a house painter who lives in Cape Town. He is very poor, with only an old banjo as a musical instrument, but he and a few close friends dream of beating the wealthy Hadji Bucks, undisputed champion of Cape Malay music. The prize is the Silver Fez, the "Holy Grail" of Cape Town's Islamic subculture. The contest involves thousands of musicians and a wide variety of tunes.

A Malay choir performs at a competition in the Good Hope Centre, Cape Town (2001)
A Malay Choir performs at an ANC-sponsored ceremony in District Six, Cape Town (2001)

The Silver Fez (the name deriving from the fez, a type of felt hat worn by Malay men in the Cape) is a competition of all-male choirs from the Malay community.

Background and themes

The film explores identity and marginalisation among the Cape Coloureds (of which the Cape Malays are a sub-group): the narrator, Mac, says: "You know, for my people, the so-called Cape coloureds of Cape Town, many of us feel like we are lost in a no-man’s-land between Europe and Asia, unsure of where we fit in". It also shows the feeling of belonging that the men have in the choirs.

The music originates from the days of slavery in South Africa, and the "Nederlandslied", a type of song that combines quarter-note vocal solos found in Arabic music with Western instrumental tunes. The lyrics have stayed the same.

Production

The Silver Fez was directed by Lloyd Ross, who was a composer before moving into filmmaking. He founded the anti-apartheid record label Shifty Records in 1983, and then began making music videos for some of the musicians before starting to make documentary films in the mid 1990s.

The film, 83 minutes long, was made in colour using an HDCAM, and uses both the South African English and Afrikaans languages.

Awards

The film was nominated for or won the following awards at various film festivals in 2009:

In 2010, The Silver Fez was nominated for the Golden Horn for Best Documentary Feature at South African Film and Television Awards (SAFTA).

References

  1. "The Silver Fez" (text and video). Al Jazeera. Witness. 15 June 2009. Retrieved 23 March 2012.
  2. ^ 7ª Edición (PDF) (in French, Spanish, and English). Festival de Cine Africano de Tarifa / Tarifa African Film Festival (FCAT). May 2010. pp. 86–87. Text has been copied from this source, which is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. (See talk page)
  3. ^ De Waal, Shaun (16 September 2009). "The Song remains the same". The Mail & Guardian. Retrieved 14 February 2023.
  4. ^ "The Silver Fez". IMDb. Retrieved 14 February 2023.
  5. ^ "The Silver Fez [videorecording] : a film set in Cape Town's unique Malay choir culture" (library catalog entry). SearchWorks catalog. Stanford University Library. Retrieved 14 February 2023.

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