Reviews

The story may be authentic to the land and the tradition, but the visual is straight out of Christian renaissance art; v. For instance, the birth of Muhammad and the tradition of Da Vinci or Gerard van Honthorst. The eye of the camera should have remained true to the spirit of the Koran and the tradition of Islam. Overwhelming a film with "beautiful" European-inspired visuals does not make the film acceptable to those who actually live and breath the spirit of Muhammad. In film, beauty for the sake beauty is the cinematographer's ego trip at the expense of the script and the director. The "motion" of motion pictures is derived from the story.

I wish to make clear that this SHAKA ZULU, unlike my series from 1985-7, was intended to be primarily fiction. As many writers have done before me, I took characters from a previous film/series or novel and used them to portray a story that reflects the outrages of the slave trade. I know, of course, that Shaka was never taken into slavery (though many of his warriors were held captive near Zanzibar). This device was used by Coppola in APOCALYPSE NOW which is not a faithful rendering of Joseph Conrad or THE CROWN which is not a faithful rendering of Elisabeth II. And many others. In this case, I used a literary license with my own work. And I was asked to take Hasselhof by the German distributors as a condition of receiving their funding. I believe, nevertheless, that David did a good job, though no amount of talent on his part could make up for the negative attributes of his public persona. But Karen was wonderful and I prayed that she could make up for this casting shortfall. By wanting this series/film to be historically accurate people do not see the forest for the trees.