Leila Dougan is a filmmaker and the current lecturer for the third year television class at Rhodes University. While she is not busy in the editing rooms, she is involved with various side projects. Recently, she has taken on recording material from the Cycle of Knowledge.

    

Note from Leila:

"What I'm basically trying to do is start a record of young poets from around South Africa, starting in Grahamstown because this is where I'm based, but also hooking up with people in Johannesburg and Cape Town. There's a lot of footage that needs to be worked through from both these cities and I'm working together with filmmakers from Joburg and Cape Town in order to showcase South African poets online. The idea is to shoot poets across SA over the next few months, and once we have enough videos, to release one video once a week from a different South African city (either Cape Town, Johannesburg or Grahamstown).

It's still early days and the process is slow, since it takes time to meet with everyone individually. But I've been going to Cycle of Knowledge once a week to shoot poets in a group, as well as meeting up with local individual poets over weekends and getting into their lives, their homes, their environments, working with them to give their words a kind of visual poetry which reflects their surroundings- whether that's in their home in the location, the corridors of Settlers Hospital that they've just been booked into, a street corner in Joza or the green lushness of the botanical gardens. My aim is to get each poet in an environment they choose and to record one of their poems in this environment, so that it can be released as a web series in a few months' time. It's still a work in progress, but one I'm thoroughly enjoying".

 

For more work by Leila, visit her Youtube page.