A Home Called Vogue

by Yazeed Kamaldien

New Media Room: 07.08.25 - 25.09.25

A Home Called Vogue is a short documentary film that explores the importance of the Vogue ball scene in Cape Town for its main protagonists, among them dancer and choreographer Kirvan Fortuin.

Fortuin was from Macassar, about 40km from central Cape Town, where he was killed in a hate crime on 13 June 2020. He was 28 years old. The Vogue balls he curated were meant as a safe space, but that was not enough to protect him from hate.

Winner of the Stockholm City Film Festival – Best Short Documentary. Festival selections for 2024 and 2025 include Stockholm City Film Festival (Sweden), New York Istanbul Short Film Festival (Turkey), Golden Bridge İstanbul Short Film Festival (Turkey), QueerCine International Film Festival (Belgium) and Melbourne Queer Film Festival (Australia).

Yazeed Kamaldien’s documentary films focus on marginalised voices: displaced, peripheral, forgotten. Among his films is a focus on finding home and what that means.

‘This Was Our Home’ focuses on former District Six residents and their longing for the homes apartheid separated them from due to forced removals. It was selected for the annual Infecting the City public arts festival in Cape Town.

‘Sounds of a Cape Town Home’ is a three-part short video series that features the Islamic praise songs Kamaldien heard regularly growing up in his paternal grandmother’s house in Lansdowne, Cape Town. It speaks of nostalgia and a longing for the forever-childhood home.

Displacement of people from their homes because of profit and war features in his films ‘Imagine the Cup’ made in Brazil and ‘Inside Kobane’ made in Syria.

Kamaldien was born in Cape Town, where he lives, and has worked as a journalist, photographer and documentary filmmaker.

Ruby Wilson