Bio
Perivi Katjavivi
Perivi is a Namibian-British filmmaker and PhD candidate at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa.
VIDEOS
Film Festival Film | 2019 | 46 mins | Directed by Perivi Katjavivi and Mpumelelo Mcata | World Premiere at the 69th Berlinale with Forum Expanded.
Press Coverage for Film Festival Film:
“Blurring reality and fiction only helps deepen its mischievous questioning of the film business. This is the product of some sharp craft in plotting and cutting, however haphazard the crew wish to make it seem.”
“Protagonist Fanon attends a film festival with the primary aim of pitching a project about Marike de Klerk. Then the film, somewhere between documentary and drama, uses its location as a way of interrogating the state of and the barriers to filmmaking in South Africa.”
“An interrogation of what the producers describe as the “hermetically sealed weirdness that is the world of a film festival” as well as a response to the “Wakandafication” of the African cultural revolution, the Medu African Film Ensemble film finds Fanon wrestling demons of expectation and industry standards as real-life leading industry professionals dole out advice straight to camera.”
Emoyeni:
Press:
“Outside of American action flicks being shot on its dunes, Namibia is not known for its film industry and when features did appear from this country with a deeply troubled colonial past they tended to be angsty epics set in the desert. Then along came UK-born, Cape Town-schooled, Namibian-based writer-director Perivi Katjavivi who shattered the mould, first with My Beautiful Nightmare (2012) and then The Unseen (2016), a black and white feature which debunked the nature shots and focused on the anger of urban youth in Windhoek and the psychological trauma of transition in a time of Fallism. He has been directing for TV and working on his new film Under The Hanging Tree.” – City Press
The Unseen 2016 | 70mins | Directed by Perivi Katjavivi | PAFF; Durban International Film Festival; LAFF; Busan; New Voices in Black Cinema; CAFF; AFRIFF; CinemAfrica; Winner, Best Film, Innsbruck; Nominated for 6 Namibia Film Awards; Special screening at the British Foreign Office 2017.
Press for The Unseen:
“in his elegiac debut, “The Unseen,” Katjavivi examines the psychological trauma of a country that endured both a long period of German colonialism and the brutalities of apartheid. Drifting through a series of spare, poetic scenes, its three leads grapple with the question of what it means to be part of a young nation that’s still trying to understand its own place in the modern world.”
– Variety
“Dystopian but never hopeless, The Unseen is an entirely new kind of cinema, inventing for itself a new language, refusing to be trapped in the past or shaped by white or western film models the way many South African films still are.”
“His characters negotiate forces of neoimperial homogeneity in the present, while trying to make sense of the past. Also episodic, we witness a series of conversations among Namibians that function like philosophical dialogues, in which diverse characters weigh up possible perspectives, possible identities, and everything in between.”
Rent The Unseen online at KweliTV
INTERVIEWS
2016 BIFF Interview | 플래시 포워드 Flash Forward “보이지 않는 The Unseen” 페리비 카티야비비 감독 Director Perivi KATJAVIVI | Published March 2017.
ARTICLES
An Apology is Not Enough: Germany, Genocide and the Limits of Reparations for Namibia.
New Film Tackles the Legacy of the First Genocide of the 20th Century
The German-Namibian Genocide: What is to be done?
Black Film, White Masks
Film and National Culture in Namibia: A study and analysis of how the films 100 Bucks and Try have contributed to the creation of post-colonial identity and national culture in independent Namibia. A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of an MA degree specialising in African Cinema, UCT.
MUSIC
Katjavivi discusses his work in the context of sound and archive practices with British-Namibian artist Libita Clayton. Inspired by Herero mythology, Perivi’s Holy Fire soundscape created under the moniker The Pharaohs formed part of Libita’s exhibition Quantum Ghost produced at Gasworks Gallery, London.
About Me
He is interested in how colonial sites of memory, particularly those related to the Herero tribe genocide, influence the everyday life in Namibia. His film work and research explore entanglements between these sites of trauma and contemporary modern life. Recent films include Emoyeni: Nsanguluko (2018); The Unseen (2016); My Beautiful Nightmare (2012). His latest film, Film Festival Film, was co-directed with Mpumelelo Mcata, and had its World Premiere at the 69th Berlinale in February 2019. Perivi holds an MA in African Cinema from the University of Cape Town and has written extensibly for the Windhoek Observer, Africa is a Country and OkayAfrica. He has presented papers at the University of Westminster, Nottingham Trent University and SOAS. Katjavivi also makes music under the moniker The Pharaohs.
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