''Liyana'' is a 2017 Swazi

documentary film A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional film, motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a Recorded history, historical record". Bill Nichols (film critic), Bil ...

directed and produced by Aaron Kopp and Amanda Kopp, following a group of Swazi orphans as they construct a narrative based on their own experiences. After premiering at the 2017

LA Film Festival The LA Film Festival was an annual film festival that was held in Los Angeles, California, and usually took place in June. It showcased independent, international, feature, documentary and short films, as well as web series, music videos, episod ...

, the film was released in the United States on October 10, 2018. It received highly positive reviews and won the award for Best Documentary Feature at the 2017 LAFF, as well as numerous other festival awards.

Synopsis

''Liyana'' follows a number of orphaned Swazi children as they develop a story under the guidance of South African author and activist

Gcina Mhlope Nokugcina Elsie Mhlophe (born 24 October 1958), known as Gcina Mhlophe, is a South African storyteller, writer, playwright, and actress. In 2016 she was listed as one of BBC's 100 Women. She tells her stories in four of South Africa's languag ...

. Their narrative stars a fictional young girl, Liyana, as she embarks on a journey to rescue her younger twin brothers from kidnapping with her pet bull, and overcomes various challenges along the way. As the students develop their tale, the live action documentary is interspersed with animated scenes depicting Liyana's adventure.

Reception

review aggregator A review aggregator is a system that collects reviews of products and services (such as films, books, video games, software, hardware, and cars). This system stores the reviews and uses them for purposes such as supporting a website where users ...

website

Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...

, the film holds an approval rating of 98% based on 41 reviews, and an average rating of 8.3/10. On

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...

, the film has a weighted average score of 80 out of 100, based on 10 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

References

External links

* 2017 films Swazi documentary films 2017 documentary films 2010s English-language films {{Eswatini-film-stub