Why Sophia Loren is one of many who love South Africa’s Pieter-Dirk Uys

The famous satirist and activist, who has recently discovered his Jewish ancestry, is the subject of a doco that celebrates his legacy. ANNE SUSSKIND previews this year's program

WHETHER YOU CALL him a Jewish-Afrikaner or an Afrikaner-Jew, Pieter-Dirk Uys says he belongs to “both the chosen people," quips one of South Africa’s most celebrated performers.

Uys is the subject of Nobody’s Died Laughing, a documentary which this week opens the fourth South African Film Festival, with 21 films available online in Australia and New Zealand.

All proceeds go to Education without Borders, a charity for disadvantaged children in the Western Cape. It is, says South African émigré and co-director Claire Jankelson, a festival “with conscience”.

Uys is a legend in South Africa. His best-known character, Afrikaner socialite Evita Bezuidenhout, is much like Dame Edna Everage, only more politicised.

“One does not run away. One runs towards,” is one of Uys’s lines. He was, as the documentary shows, an important social activist under apartheid and has continued to be so since its demise, using his performer’s licence to satirise both the old regime and the disappointing ANC government in today’s South Africa.

He is also known for good works, such as travelling solo the length and breadth of his country to 150 disadvantaged and rural schools during the height of the AIDS crisis, employing his humour with youngsters in teaching them how to use condoms to protect themselves.

In the documentary, his praises are sung by Sophia Loren (she was his childhood dream and later formed a real bond with him), actress Charlize Theron and Nelson Mandela, among others.

Uys grew up as an Afrikaner, and it was only after his mother’s suicide he learned she’d been Jewish and had fled from the Nazis in Berlin. He treasures a letter, “a carbon copy of the one Ma wrote”, posted in 1948 to Franz Michels (her former fiancé) in Germany.