Vuleka Productions

We are an award-winning independent South African production company that produces film, television, video, radio, audio, print and New Media.

Vuleka has a reputation for producing media about, with and/or for children, as well as media around social issues. Based in Durban, in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province, the company emerged from a creative partnership between Madoda Ncayiyana and Julie Frederikse, who began scriptwriting together in 1993 and built a reputation for authentic African storytelling.

Vuleka’s first feature film, Izulu Lami / My Secret Sky, is directed by Madoda Ncayiyana, produced by Jeremy Nathan and co-produced by Julie Frederikse. The scriptwriting partnership of Frederikse and Ncayiyana continues with Izulu Lami / My Secret Sky, as they co-wrote the screenplay. The film has won several awards at international festivals: the Dikalo Award for Best Feature Film at the Pan African International Film Festival in Cannes, the Audience Award for Best Feature Film and the Best Actress Award for then-10-year-old star Sobahle Mkhabase at Spain’s Cinema Africano de Tarifa Film Festival, as well as the SIGNIS Award for Best Film at the Zanzibar International Film Festival.

Izulu Lami / My Secret Sky is co-produced by Dv8 and Vuleka Productions with support from Africa’s top film distributor, Ster-Kinekor, the South African National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), the South African Department of Trade and Industry, Fonds Images Afrique and eThekwini Municipality. The film was shot entirely in Durban and rural KwaZulu Natal in 2008 and released in South African cinemas and on DVD in 2009.

Vuleka’s latest documentary follows the lives of the young children whose talents were discovered by director Madoda Ncayiyana through his casting of Izulu Lami / My Secret Sky as they make their own movie. In directing this documentary, funded by Visions Sud est and the South African National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), Ncayiyana follows the children as they write their script, cast actors and generally impress with their application of the skills they learned while on the shoot of their first feature film.

Izulu Lami / My Secret Sky was inspired by a short film produced by Vuleka for the Steps for the Future film collection which won the Djibril Diop Mambety Prize for Best African Short Film at the Cannes Film Festival and Special Mention awards at Cinema Africano Milano and Vues d’Afrique, Montreal in 2003. This short film was screened at the Sundance, Banff, Tampere and other international film festivals, as well as in South African cinemas before the feature film, Whale Rider, and has been broadcast internationally by e.g. BBC, CBC and ARTE.

Vuleka produced an historical romantic drama, Land of Thirst, for SABC-2 which was broadcast as a TV mini-series and feature film in 2008, and distributed internationally by High Point, UK. Set in the Karoo in 1913, the drama is directed by Meg Rickards, who adapted the screenplay from a nearly 100-year-old novel, Margaret Harding by Perceval Gibbon at the Binger Film Lab in Amsterdam. It stars Hlomla Dandala, Nina Lucy Wylde, Ian Roberts and Terry Norton.

Vuleka has built a reputation as an international television co-producer, e.g. Takalani Sesame, the first South African co-production with Sesame Workshop (US) and Making It with Channel Four (UK). Ncayiyana and Frederikse have written, directed and produced drama, documentaries and children’s series for South African television and international clients, e.g. the European Union, the United Nations organization, UNIFEM and Select Media of the Tribeca Film Centre. Vuleka produces media in English and in all of South Africa’s national languages and produces documentaries and outreach media for South African NGOS, e.g. the AIDS Foundation of South Africa and SaveAct, Financial Services and Sustainable Livelihoods for the Poor.

Vuleka’s powerful documentary on children living without parents, A Child is a Child (because of other people), funded by NFVF, is available for purchase on DVD on the CHILDREN page of this website. Vuleka has a track record in producing media on social issues, including not only HIV/AIDS but its effect on children, especially who have lost parents to the disease (Orphans and Vulnerable Children, OVC), e.g. for the Human Sciences Research Council and the Ford Foundation.

Vuleka’s roots are in radio production as Ncayiyana and Frederikse met through the development and production of a landmark 30-episode radio drama series commissioned for broadcast ahead of South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, and they have hosted and produced radio talk shows, dramas and documentaries in all of the country’s 11 national languages, as well as for international broadcast and distribution, e.g. for Amnesty International, SafAIDS and the United Nations. Vuleka has produced radio dramas on voter education for the Democracy Development Programme broadcast on community radio, as well as programming for the SABC’s African language broadcasters, e.g. UkhoziFM and Umhlobo wenene, and SAfm.

Vuleka conducts in-service training for interns from media training institutions, e.g. Durban University of Technology, Rhodes University, University of KwaZulu-Natal, and conducts training courses at a range of levels, from non-professional to specific industry needs (e.g. video editing).

In terms of print media, Julie Frederikse and Madoda Ncayiyana have co-authored a book, Careers in Media, published by Heineman Educational Publishers, and Vuleka develops and produces other print material.