"The best thing to have come out of the South African film industry in the past years is without a doubt its documentaries. This is partially because a few technicians and directors who used to produce some pretty awful anti-apartheid news movies have now matured into fully rounded filmmakers"
THE GUGULETU SEVENCape Times
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"Veteran film-maker Lindy Wilson was a regular figure at the mid to late 1990s TRC hearings in Cape Town. Particularly during the cycle of human rights and amnesty hearings on the deaths of seven young men in 1986.
In her documentary film, Guguletu Seven, Wilson provides a remarkable narrative frame for this tale of resistance, betrayal and death"
THE GUGULETU SEVENMail and Guardian
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"Lindy Wilson's documentary is streets ahead of most other local political documentaries. The main reason is that its maker tried to find some kind of poetic truth in it all and succeeded in quite a remarkable manner."
THE GUGULETU SEVENMail and Guardian
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"Lindy Wilson's documentary, The Guguletu Seven, was an exercise in extremely effective understatement. Wilson obviously realised that it wanted for no embellishment; in putting together the documentary she forswore the usual devices of moody music and visual trickery."
LAST SUPPER IN HORTSLEY STREET Weekly Mail, April 4 - 10 1986
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Wilson's film presents a moslem family who have resisted relocation until they are the last... before the first whites moved in. The film records their final, inevitable transferral and their first months in the new mod-cons abode in an alien, hostile environment. It is a sombre, unrelenting picture in which the suffering of one dispossessed family is made tangible by the grief that accompanies a line (unwritten and unrehearsed) such as "Here you forget about God". The camera (by Cliff Bestall) which peers over shoulders and through gates and doorways draws the viewer into a proximity with its spiritually isolated subjects that is disturbing in its closeness; there is almost no music but the bursts of carnival and choir-sung songs are as haunting as any of the visual images.
BANNING THE REALITY Cape Times, December 9, 1986
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"Last Supper In Horstley Street"... has been prohibited from being shown at a Cape Town and surburban arts festival, for fear it would "inflame feelings given the present situation". What about the original feelings of those kicked out of their homes? Why was no thought given to inflammation then?
ROBBEN ISLAND OUR UNIVERSITYThe Telegraph, London, November 4 1988
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For inspirational uplift, Robben Island Our University (Channel-4) would take some beating. It seems that in special circumstances prison, even a harsh one like South Africa's Robben Island, can be a rich, humanising experience. This was the theme of the conversation between three former prisoners. The prisoners set up their "university", holding tutorials as they shovelled lime. Nelson Mandela gave them legal advice and Alexander (in the film) taught them history. Each recalled their Christian backgrounds, then Sharpeville and their conversion to armed struggle. Nothing has made clearer what a logical step that can seem.
ROBBEN ISLAND OUR UNIVERSITYThe Star - Johannesburg, Aug 19 1988
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Lindy Wilson's "Robben Island Our University" is without doubt the highlight of the Weekly Mail film festival thus far. Wilson requires nothing more than a pertinent off-camera question as catalyst for a series of moving discussions. The men (Fikile Bam, Kwedie Mkhalipi and Neville Alexander) who view themselves without self-pity and much self-irony, reveal themselves in all their human vulnerability and strength...repudiating the notion that a prison sentence will rehabilitate the political transgressor. The inverse is true.