#146: Teboho Edkins

Teboho Edkins’ hybrid documentary films question the boundaries between genres – between documentary and fictional narrative, and between cinema and video art. In fact, his works often reflect the very process of filmmaking. His ‘controlled’ or ‘staged’ reality is often shot and edited like a feature film, and his camerawork shows a flair for absurd situations. The artist has spent much of his life in South Africa, and it is from there that he draws many of his inspirations. Initiation and the marking of entry into adulthood, identity and otherness, are in particular recurrent themes in Teboho Edkins’ work.

Teboho Edkins shows:

Gangster Backstage, 2013, 38:00 min
Gangster Backstage is a documentary film shot in Cape Town, South Africa. As the narrative progresses from casting interview through scenes in an empty theatre, a palpable sense of confinement builds: trapped in a fear- and cigarette-filled purgatory, one is left with swirling thoughts about the nature of freedom, imprisonment and what awaits the soul in the after-life.

Gangster Film, 2020, 5:24″min
The background to the  short film is the far-reaching influence of Chinese settlers in Lesotho. In the course of the film shoot my film crew and I, 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.

Ghosts of Karatara, 2024, 20:39 min
Ghosts is a short documentary film in which ghosts, both real and imagined, haunt the lives of a rural community in their small town in post-apartheid South Africa.

Initiation, 2016, 11 min
High in the mountains of Lesotho, Mosaku is anxiously awaiting the return of his older brother from an initiation ceremony. The initiates spend 5 months in a remote secrete location. What rituals are performed is known only to those who have taken part. But when the boys return, they are grown men.

Teboho Edkins (*1980 in Tennessee, USA)  grew up in Lesotho and lives and works in Cape Town and Berlin. He studied photography and fine art at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, South Africa and film at Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains in Tourcoing, France. This was followed by a degree in directing at the Deutsche Film und Fernseh-akademie in Berlin (dffb).

Teboho Edkins’s films have shown at many film festivals well as group and solo exhibitions, including at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; South London Gallery; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Weserburg-Museum für Moderne Kunst, Bremen; Museum of Modern Art, New York City; IFF Rotterdam and Internationale Film Fest Berlin (Berlinale).

Various film festivals have also presented a showcase of his work, most recently the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in 2023.