Liza Key transformed South Africa’s film scene, challenging apartheid censorship, nurturing filmmakers and bringing humanity to stories of injustice, opening new possibilities for South African storytelling.
Liza Key (1954-2026)
In the first week of September 1990 a bomb went off in the Avalon Theatre in Fordsburg – the first act of political violence I experienced in Johannesburg after returning home a few weeks earlier. In my mid-twenties, I had come back to work at the Weekly Mail, and this attack was to protest against a screening that was part of the paper’s film festival, of a Canadian film called How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired.
The Weekly Mail Film Festival was transition-era Johannesburg’s most thrilling event. Its extensive programme ran from still-banned anti-apartheid documentaries to cutting-edge international features to revived gems of South African film history like Come Back Africa, and it created a tumult in our office and in the city – all of which seemed to swirl around its director, Liza Key.
Liza had an insouciant beauty, untamed hair and eyes of pure mischief, and she seemed to float through it all in a cloud of pearls and exposed cleavage, trailing drama and desire in her wake. She died on 11 October, at the age of 71, in her “Parkview plaas”, as her partner of 25 years, the director Janice…
