Act Cape Town is a South African film acting academy based in Loop Street, which was founded in 2005. The film school trains and nurtures acting talent, from short courses to training programmes over three years across acting disciplines suited to film, television and theatre. Act Cape Town director, Candice Poole, has built an accredited and reputable educational institution over the years, which culminates in an annual graduation ceremony. Functioning as an awards ceremony and an opportunity to showcase scenes and short films created during the year, it's an important milestone for fellow actors to come together in celebration. Invited among a host of renowned industry professionals and coaches, Spling was able to witness the ceremony first hand.

Act Cape Town prides itself on employing some of South Africa's brightest and most experienced acting talents as teachers. Grant Swanby, Nicola Hanekom, Tamryn Spiers and Matthew Kalil are just a few of the industry coaches developing the next generation of acting talent, taking a multidisciplinary approach in helping them showcase their work. The institution is geared towards a practical outcome for students, giving them the tools to get a foothold in the industry, offering experience in terms of professional know-how (auditioning, accent work, technique and improvisation) and generating great material for their first show reel.

A red carpet, champagne, strawberries and plenty of flash photography, the event drew parents, students, staff and friends to the Labia Theatre. Conducting the ceremony from within the Labia's main cinema, Act Cape Town's presence was felt through banners, screens and a branded lectern light box. While there were one or two technical glitches, the evening wasn't impeded, moving at a clipped pace. Certificates were awarded to students from 1st to 3rd year with great applause for each of the personalities accepting their certificate of completion.

Being screened at Cape Town's most iconic independent cinema, it must have been quite a rush or shock for students, who saw their faces on the big screen. Moving from scenes for the first year students who took screenplay excerpts from films like Get Out, Madea's Family Reunion and Revolutionary Road, it was enjoyable to see young talents being shaped and molded. The second-year students had to produce a short film, which enabled them to have more creative control, writing characters who aligned with some of their acting heroes and experimenting with a longer format. Then, the highlight of the evening was the third year film directed and written by Grant Swanby, which featured all of the third year students in a well-crafted dramatic thriller about a dysfunctional family.

Act Cape Town is a niche acting school that is equipping young actors, many of whom show great promise, and could very well be the faces of the future. With alumni such as Christia Visser, Carishma Basday and Jessica Sutton, it's easy to see how their focused training is paying off. It's wonderful to see blossoming acting talent, especially at a grassroots level and it shouldn't be long before Act Cape Town reaches a whole new wave of promising young actors in pursuit of their dreams.

The Three Wells podcast is based on the principles expressed in Matthew Kalil's book, The Three Wells of Screenwriting. Working screenwriters, film professors, first-time screenwriters, adaptation writers, TV writers, commissioned writers, script editors, playwrights, novelists, songwriters, journalists, documentary writers... anyone looking to break into their next idea or overcome writer's block can benefit from this practical screenwriting aid.

With Spling as the host of The Three Wells podcast, Matthew gets to the nitty-gritty of what it takes to be a writer, how to find inspiration and how to apply The Three Wells of Screenwriting methodology through the lens of the films, TV shows and novels of screenwriters and authors.

Sam Wilson is an author whose first novel Commedia earned him an MA with distinction from UCT... he has since gone on to write the acclaimed international sci-fi thriller, Zodiac. He has also written, developed and directed a number of television programs and documentaries, best known for Munki and Trunk, Jungle Beat Explorers and URBO: The Adventures of Pax Afrika. An integral part of the Clockwork Zoo team, he's currently working as a writer and director at Sunrise Productions.

Pivoting around the metaphor of a well and finding your deep sources of inspiration, the concept deals with the External Sources well, the Imagination well and the Memory well. Kalil discusses how one digs into each of these wells in terms of what's been gleaned from pop culture, what the mind can fathom and how our experiences can be leveraged in the writing process.

An extension of the book, Kalil uses the podcast as a platform to discuss the writing process with renowned screenwriters and authors to unpack how they've come to rely on each of these wells in their writing journeys. Speaking about each of these wells and finding out how these screenwriters operate, you'll be able to get a better understanding of the core principles at play in The Three Wells of Screenwriting and hopefully be inspired by some of the ideas and concepts for your own projects.

Here's a review of Matthew Kalil's book, which will give you a much greater understanding and a veritable treasure trove of honest advice that has helped him and is worth revisiting.

This The Three Wells podcast was recorded at Fine Music Radio's recording studio at the Artscape in Cape Town, South Africa.

When you really think about it, everything in life is a gamble including liking the movie we’ve picked. This is especially true when it comes to some favorite area of interest of ours, we’d like to see covered so that it suits our fancy. So, if you are a gambling aficionado, you’d like to see a good gambling flick every now and then… right? So, to help you pick out a couple of great ones well-worth your time and your taste we sat down to a gambling movie marathon to select and review a few of them for you.

So here it goes...

Mississippi Grind

The story line is about an average unlucky gambler named Gerry, portrayed by Ben Mendelsohn, who nevertheless feels that his big break is sure to happen sooner rather than later. And his big break does indeed come when he meets Curtis, a young traveling gambler, portrayed by Ryan Reynolds, while playing Texas Hold ‘em. Curtis told him that the reason he was so good at cards was because he never cared about winning. The two of them start betting on races and gambling together and eventually gamble at different towns down the Mississippi River to New Orleans.

The movie is a perfect blend of a road movie and a gambling motion picture with great portrayals of gamblers on the part of both Mendelsohn and Reynolds.

The Best of It

This feature length documentary gives us an amazing look at the real life of professional sports bettors in Las Vegas. It follows the woes and joys of somewhat quirky characters by the names of Boston, The Shrink, Dink, and Banker. This is a great movie if you want to learn more about touts and money management and not just getting the best out of your number.

The lighter bits featuring their wives, pets and assistants provide excellent balance to the darker side of the documentary.

Lay the Favorite

Now, this is one movie that you can take a pass on. It is based on the journalist Beth Raymor’s memoir of the same name. She was a Fulbright fellow and studied offshore gambling operations in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama. The book is about her experiences in the sex industry, amateur boxing and sports-betting. Lay The Favorite, the movie, focuses on her relocation to Vegas in the 1990s where it turned out she’s got more than just good luck when it comes to gambling. To top it all off, she falls in love with Dink (yes, the sports gambler from The Best of It) and you can imagine how happy that made his wife Tulip.

Nevertheless, it is a shame that a film with such a great array for a cast (Bruce Willis, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Vince Vaughn) did not do proper justice to the book. The plot was just moving too fast. That said, go and get Raymor’ s book so you can actually enjoy her action- packed life story.

Casino

This is another gambling picture that is based on a true story from the 1970s and it is a true gem. Under the direction of Martin Scorsese in this 1995 classic Robert De Niro stars as Ace Rothstein, an expert gambling handicapper sent by the Chicago mob outfit to oversee the operations at Tangiers Casino in Las Vegas. Ace and his enforcer Nicky Santoro, played by Joe Pesci, also had to keep grabbing enough money off the top to pay the mafia while evading the FBI and to deal with the Gaming Commission. Eventually they end up competing over managing the casino and Ginger, Ace’s alcoholic wife.

Casino is a must-see flick as it portrays casinos during the good old days in their prime. You have to agree that now that the corporations have taken over they resemble vacation results and movie studios rather than what your standard casino looked like back in the day.

The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas

Gambling doesn’t pop into your mind for sure when you think of the Flintstones. Still, Fred and Barney, portrayed in the movie as young bachelors, do make it to Rock Vegas after all. Chip Rockefeller, who has his heart set on winning Wilma for himself, invites Wilma and her new friends Betty, Fred, and Barney to his Rock Vegas resort. And as always, it is Barney who is keeping Fred in check so this time it is to keep Fred away from playing high-stakes poker.

We also get to see gangsters pay a visit to Chip who owed a lot of money but other than that we don’t recommend you watch the movie if you expect to see a lot of casino-related scenes. If you on the other were missing your two favorite couples from the Stone Age then this is the movie for you.

Harvard Man

Yes, you can even make money and loads of it in fact when losing a game. Alan Jensen, a Harvard student and a point guard on their basketball team, is in need of $100,000 to help out his parents whose house got destroyed in a tornado. His girlfriend Cindy Bandolino, whose father is a mob boss persuades Alan to throw a game against Dartmouth for the money. She tells him that her father is behind this, but she actually she goes to her father's associates, Teddy Carter and Kelly Morgan for funding. And guess what! These two are undercover FBI agents.

The plot where the main character is caught between having a mafia boss and the FBI on his back at the same time would have been very intriguing if it wasn’t for the long flashes of Adrian’s character hallucinations on LSD. It ruined the movie, so this is yet another movie that's not an open recommendation to anyone.

21

The gambling movie is so worth watching! It is based on the true story of a group of MIT students who tried to rob Vegas casinos by playing blackjack and being geniuses at counting cards. The main character Ben Campbell is a mathematical genius who gets accepted into Harvard Medical School after MIT, but can’t afford to pay the $300,000 tuition. However, a professor of his from MIT invites him to join a blackjack team with some of his students and they end up flying back and forth to Las Vegas with Professor Rosa as the greed and money collect but Ben also has to pay the price and forgetting all about an engineering competition is just one of them...

This movie will make you want to learn about how to beat the system but will also teach you all about the much needed caution in gambling. Hope you enjoy the thrilling 2 hours.

There you go - to each his own when it comes to matters of taste, of course, but here is hoping this pick of gambling flicks are of some use to you! Happy watching, rolling, and betting to you all...