TV/Video

Vuleka Productions produces drama, documentary and children’s programming for television and on video. Vuleka’s most recent TV drama is a three–part TV mini-series, Land of Thirst, directed by Meg Rickards and produced by Julie Frederikse and Madoda Ncayiyana, broadcast on SABC 2 in early 2008 (with a feature film version due out later in the year, see Film).

Vuleka’s Madoda Ncayiyana has directed Vuleka’s environmental children’s series for SABC Education, Adventures at the Water Hole, since 2001 (see Children). Ncayiyana’s feature film, My Secret Sky, will also be broadcast on SABC TV.

Ncayiyana directed a documentary broadcast on SABC 1 in 2007, Life Went On, which draws on his own family’s experience of apartheid-era forced removals from Cato Manor, Durban to KwaMashu township, and an “unauthorised” profile of South Africa’s controversial fraudster Schabir Shaik for SABC 3, which won the Best Documentary Award at the Kingdom Film Festival in Durban. He directs TV commercials, e.g. for the national Department of Education, and directs in African languages in addition to English, e.g. a drama and magazine programming in Xhosa on HIV/AIDS, executive produced by Select Media Inc of the Tribeca Film Centre, New York City for the Universities of Fort Hare and Pennsylvania and funded by the US National Institutes of Health.

Nikki Comninos directed two TV documentaries for Vuleka in 2007: Do Girls Want It? for SABC 1, probing notions of virginity, and Zulu Nation for eTV, on traditional and contemporary ethnic identity. She also directed a five-part documentary series, Cato Manor: Contested Past, Pivotal Future, for a municipal museum in Durban.

Julie Frederikse produced all the above documentaries, as well as a range of programming in the areas of history, education, health and development, directed by Ncayiyana, for the United Nations organisation for women, UNIFEM; the International Planned Parenthood Association; South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council; the Programme for the Survivors of Violence and Tourism KwaZulu-Natal and other bodies.