(Pic by SuzyBernstein)Standard Bank Young Artist winner 2010 signs first book deal and launches second feature film.
Durban’s youngest and most prolific film maker, the multi award-winning Claire Angelique, has had a busy year – with the presentation of her first feature film, My Black Little Heart, at this year’s National Arts Festival, followed by the production of another feature film, Palace of Bone and the launch of her collective personal journals. Titled The Last Initiation, this is her first book through Rebel Rabble, in which she reveals herself and her journey over the past few years.
The winner of the 2009 Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Film, Angelique is well known in the arts and entertainment industry as a dancer, writer, journalist, music promoter, choreographer, performance artist and film maker.
In a report for Cue, the National Arts Festival magazine, dated June 27, Megan Jackson states: “Forget everything you have heard about Young Artist Award winner Claire Angelique. It is near-impossible to fully appreciate the complexity of this dancer-turned-writer-turned-filmmaker. She’s raw and edgy yet has a poetic vulnerability that peeks through her apparently hard exterior. Her film My Black Little Heart is a hellishly beautiful semi-autobiographical account of growing up on The Bluff in Durban.”
Regarding Palace of Bone, which was shot on a cellphone camera, Megan Jackson goes on to say that it is “… a step away from savagely personal. In fact it’s anything but autobiographical, Still, Angelique’s trademark dark, beautiful imagery pervades, as do the thematic obsessions with the underbelly and the underdog.”
The Last Initiation is published in a hard cover coffee table cum-journal format. Limited editions include a multi media DVD featuring some of Angelique's music videos, short films and web-links. The journal has been reproduced as authentically as possible - mostly in her own handwriting. The content includes her poems, movie ideas, collages, song lyrics, sketches, photos and engrossing daily insights and musings. This is a candid self portrait of a young artist with serious determination and ambition yet who is oft caught in a romantic juxtaposition of excess, rampant escapism and an almost uncanny feel for the darker side of her nature. It is though, an authentic view into the mind of a creative junkie seeing the new South Africa in a completely original way.
“The Last Initiation invites us into the inner labroom of a mercurial mind - exposed as it was - in the red light of passion and pain," says Oshen, director of Rebel Rabble. "The book is honest and raw. A fascinating, mind-blowing trip. It almost feels like this is the comeback tour of the Beat Generation. Echoes of William S. Burroughs, Ginsberg, Wolfe and Kesey abound. Within the red covers of the book, Durban becomes a canvas of dirt and dreams. Angelique holds up a whole deck of lenses to the reader - together they present a 3-D picture of an artist flying at the speed of night."
Rebel Rabble is a micro-publishing company that operates out of Durban. The publishers are best known for their back-catalogue of provocative books penned by authentic writers, such as struggle activists Phyllis Naidoo. The Last Initiation is one of seven titles to be released by Rebel Rabble this year. Some of the other titles include Legends of the Tide about the forgotten fisherfolk of Durban and a Greenpeace endorsed hand-book guide to online protesting using new social media such as Twitter and Facebook. The Last Initiation is available nationwide at all major book retailers and at online retailers such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Borders.
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