Days of Cannibalism

About Director

Teboho Edkins was born in Tennessee, USA, grew up in Southern Africa and lives and works in Cape Town and Berlin. His films have shown at over 500 film festivals, as well as various group and solo exhibitions, including at the Berlinale, the Centre Pompidou and Tate Modern. His films have also been acquired by several public and private art collections. Various film festivals have also presented a showcase of his work, most recently the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in 2023.

Teboho Edkins’ hybrid documentary films question the boundaries between genres – between documentary and fictional narrative, and between cinema and video art. In fact, his works often reflect the very process of filmmaking. His ‘controlled’ or ‘staged’ reality is often shot and edited like a feature film, and his camerawork shows a flair for absurd situations. The artist has spent much of his life in South Africa, and it is from there that he draws many of his inspirations. Initiation and the marking of entry into adulthood, identity and otherness, are in particular recurrent themes in Teboho Edkins’ work.

Days of Cannibalism

78min, 2020, France/South Africa/Netherlands

Teboho Edkins

Days of Cannibalism accounts the social impact of a completely different economic model on a traditional society. When Chinese entrepreneurs arrive in Lesotho, in the district of Thaba Tseka, everything changes. Old structures begin to disintegrate, and latent violence threatens to explode. What is it going to be: to eat or to be eaten?

The Orphanage

8min, 2021, Germany/South Africa/France

Teboho Edkins

On the rural plains of Lesotho, Teboho Edkins documents the lives of children living in a Buddhist orphanage. Delicately observing every gesture, the film explores the relationships of power present in the heart of the hospice and ultimately questions the conditions for the sharing of a system of moral values.