Madoda Ncayiyana

Madoda Ncayiyana is a veteran of radio, TV and video productions as well as film, mainly as a director but also as an actor and producer. He will direct the full-length feature film, My Secret Sky, for Vuleka Productions and Dv8 Films, and co-wrote the script with Julie Frederikse.

Ncayiyana has directed all of Vuleka’s award-winning productions, including The Sky in Her Eyes, which won Best African Short Film at the Cannes Film Festival (2003) and Adventures at the Water Hole, winner of a Creative Excellence Award at the US International Film and Video Festival (2004). He has also directed several documentaries broadcast on SABC (2006-2007), ranging from an inside look at South African fraudster Schabir Shaik to an intimate look at his own family’s apartheid-era removal from the Cato Manor settlement to a moving profile on children who live alone without parents.

Ncayiyana walked the red carpet to receive his award at Cannes, was invited to the Independent Feature Project in New York (2006), to the Rotterdam Film Festival for the Cinemart Lab (2005) and to the 3 Continents Film Festival in Nantes, France for “Producing for the South” (2004). He was a producer on Vuleka’s film and TV mini-series, Land of Thirst (2008), and played a role in the drama.

Ncayiyana has a background in theatre, having directed productions, written plays and performed at theatre festivals throughout Europe and Africa, including the Edinburgh festival, where he won the prestigious Scotsman Award, and South Africa’s Grahamstown festival, where he has won awards for acting and writing. He was the first black actor hired to work full-time in a South African performing arts council during the apartheid era and the first black director of a Natal Performing Arts Council (NAPAC) production. He was co-founder of the environmental theatre company, Theatre for Africa, and the director of Maningi Theatre Workshop of Durban. He has acted in many SABC TV productions and his voice is known to South African TV and radio audiences from radio dramas, commercials, a daily radio talk show he hosted and a weekly comedy series he directed on SAfm.

Julie Frederikse

Julie Frederikse has produced all of Vuleka’s award-winning film and TV productions, most recently a film and television mini-series for SABC 2, Land of Thirst, an historical romantic drama set in South Africa’s Karoo in 1913, which won international distribution in a deal signed at MIPCOM, Cannes, 2007. She was producer of The Sky in Her Eyes, which won Best African Short Film at the Cannes Film Festival’s Critics Choice Week (2003), as well as awards in Milan and Montreal, and was selected for screening at Sundance, Tampere, Clermont-Ferrand, Banff, Toronto and many other international film festivals, televised in Europe, North America and Australia, and screened at the United Nations General Assembly Session on Children. She and Ncayiyana have co-written the screenplay of My Secret Sky, which she is producing with Dv8 Films in 2008. The feature film was selected for development at the “Producing with the South” seminar by the French 3 Continents Film Festival in Nantes, Paris and Cannes in 2004-05 and by AVEA (Audio Visual Entrepreneurs of Africa) in 2002.

Frederikse has produced TV series, including an award-winning environmental children’s show, and documentaries for South African broadcasters. She also produces for international clients, e.g. the European Union, United Nations, US National Institutes of Health, Planned Parenthood International and the Ford Foundation. Her international TV co-productions include series for Sesame Workshop, US and Channel Four, UK.

Frederikse has a background in writing and in radio. She is the author of nine books, including a novel, The Diary Without a Key (Heinemann Books, 1994) that won the South African Children’s Book of the Year award, while other books of hers have been nominated for the M-Net Prize, the CNA Literary Award and the Sunday Times Alan Paton Book Award. Primary source material used in research for her books on the anti-apartheid struggle is housed as “The Julie Frederikse Collection” at the Robben Island Mayibuye Archives in Cape Town and at the South African History Archive at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She worked as a journalist covering southern Africa for the US Public Broadcasting System’s National Public Radio, BBC Africa, CBC and Radio Nederland; hosted radio talk shows on SA-fm and Capital Radio; and studied filmmaking at MIT (Massachussetts Institute of Technology) in the US under Ricky Leacock, Jean Rouche and Ed Pincus.