Kanarie (Afrikaans for 'Canary') is a coming-of-age musical war drama. Drafted into the South African army during apartheid, a young soldier joins the military's traveling choir, and romance on the battlefield causes him to deal with his long-repressed sexual identity through hardship, camaraderie, first love, and the liberating freedom of music, the true self can be discovered.
Schalk Bezuidenhout
Johan Niemand
Hannes Otto
Wolfgang Müller
Germandt Geldenhuys
Ludolf Otterman
Gérard Rudolf
Reverend Koch
Jacques Bessenger
Reverend Engelbrecht
Francois Jacobs
Tiaan Taljaard
De Klerk Oelofse
Walter "Rambo" Boonzaaier
Ludwig Binge
Daan Goosen
David Viviers
Kevin Scott
Kanarie (Afrikaans for 'Canary') is a coming-of-age musical war drama. Drafted into the South African army during apartheid, a young soldier joins the military's traveling choir, and romance on the battlefield causes him to deal with his long-repressed sexual identity through hardship, camaraderie, first love, and the liberating freedom of music, the true self can be discovered.
A young man in 1981 South Africa must complete his brutal and racist two years of compulsory military service while desperately maintaining the secrecy of his homosexuality.
Inspired by global phenomenon of military wives choirs, the story celebrates a band of misfit women who form a choir on a military base. As unexpected bonds of friendship flourish, music and laughter transform their lives, helping each other to overcome their fears for loved ones in combat.
The plot centers on students involved in the Soweto Riots, in opposition to the implementation of Afrikaans as the language of instruction in schools. The stage version presents a school uprising similar to the Soweto uprising on June 16, 1976. A narrator introduces several characters among them the school girl activist Sarafina. Things get out of control when a policeman shoots several pupils in a classroom. Nevertheless, the musical ends with a cheerful farewell show of pupils leaving school, which takes most of act two. In the movie version Sarafina feels shame at her mother's (played by Miriam Makeba in the film) acceptance of her role as domestic servant in a white household in apartheid South Africa, and inspires her peers to rise up in protest, especially after her inspirational teacher, Mary Masombuka (played by Whoopi Goldberg in the film version) is imprisoned.
Singer Freddie Mercury, guitarist Brian May, drummer Roger Taylor and bass guitarist John Deacon take the music world by storm when they form the rock 'n' roll band Queen in 1970. Hit songs become instant classics. When Mercury's increasingly wild lifestyle starts to spiral out of control, Queen soon faces its greatest challenge yet – finding a way to keep the band together amid the success and excess.
Max is a handsome young man who, after a fateful tryst with a German soldier, is forced to run for his life. Eventually Max is placed in a concentration camp where he pretends to be Jewish because in the eyes of the Nazis, gays are the lowest form of human being. But it takes a relationship with an openly gay prisoner to teach Max that without the love of another, life is not worth living.
Upon receiving his draft notice and leaving his family ranch in Oklahoma, Claude heads to New York and befriends a tribe of long-haired hippies on his way to boot camp.
Arthur is a grumpy pensioner who can't understand why his wife Marion would want to embarrass herself singing silly songs with her unconventional local choir. But choir director Elizabeth sees something special in the reluctant Arthur and refuses to give up on him. As she coaxes him out of his shell, Arthur realizes that it is never too late to change.
Raised a boy in East Berlin, Hedwig undergoes a personal transformation in order to emigrate to the U.S., where she reinvents herself as an 'internationally ignored' but divinely talented rock diva, inhabiting a 'beautiful gender of one'.