Sunday Best — Netflix
Writer, journalist, producer, musician, artist and director Sacha Jenkins died earlier this year at the age of 54. He leaves behind a solid legacy as a critic, archivist and keen dissector of popular culture and black history.
In his final documentary, Jenkins’ lens narrows in on US TV legend Ed Sullivan, whose Sunday night variety show brought the sights and sounds of Elvis Presley and The Beatles to millions of US living rooms and helped to change the course of US popular culture. Flying in the face of widespread prejudice, Sullivan also helped to make stars out of black artists from Harry Belafonte and Jackie Wilson, to Ray Charles, The Supremes and Stevie Wonder.
The Nazi Cartel — Showmax
Ask most people who the “king of cocaine” is, and they’ll probably name notorious 1980s Colombian narco Pablo Escobar. But as this tightly wound three-part docuseries shows, Escobar was not the originator of the idea of a globally influential, South American drug-lord.
The original king of cocaine was Roberto Suarez, a dapper Bolivian livestock farmer turned drug smuggler, who controlled 90% of the world’s supply of the drug by the early 1990s. Featuring interviews with members of Suarez’s cartel, family, former Drug Enforcement Agency agents and investigative journalists, the series unravels the unbelievable story of Suarez’s meteoric rise and the deals he made with notorious Nazi and “Butcher of Lyon” Klaus Barbie.
The ABC Killer — Showmax
While the rest of SA and the world were basking in the hopeful glow of the birth of the rainbow nation in 1994, Moses Sithole, a young, bitter and murderously angry young man, was wreaking havoc on the East Rand.
In 1994 and 1995 he brutally raped and murdered 38 women who he lured with the promise of employment. The terror that the “ABC killer” wrought on the country served as a stark reminder of the darker side of the democratic era when crime was steeply on the rise and the lives of women were cheap and cut tragically short by the brutality of men.
Director Jasyn Howes’ three-part true crime docuseries takes viewers back to those years, providing all the gripping and horrific detail of SA’s most prolific serial killer, and the police officers and journalists who worked to bring him to justice.
Washington Black — Disney Plus
Sterling K Brown produces and stars in this adventure history series based on the acclaimed novel by Esi Edugyan. When young slave, born George Washington “Wash” Black, escapes from a plantation in Barbados, he embarks on a remarkable journey during which he will encounter a new world, and all the possibilities and perils it throws his way, as he strives to experience something akin to freedom in a world intent on his subjugation.
Moon — Mubi.com
Iraqi-born Austrian director Kurdwin Ayub uses the thriller genre as an effective means of addressing the issue of the treatment of women in the Islamic world. When an Austrian cage fighter is hired by a wealthy Jordanian to become the self-defence teacher of his teenage sisters, she soon discovers that her new pupils are not interested in protecting themselves from outside threats but rather from the terrors that face them from within the walls of their potentially lethal home.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.