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YOUNG woman from Extension 4 in Joza, Rini, in Grahamstown winks at courage and gets the bus to Johannesburg. She carries a camera and a dream.

“I had to talk to my uncle,” says Nontombozuko Twiggy Matiwana.

“I was doing a marketing course in PE and being miserable.

“My surrogate parents, my aunt Nancy Makile and Zolile Braveman Makile, my aunt’s husband, I told them I wanted to shoot videos and play around with a camera.

“They gave me a Samsung, for family things. Like my brother going to the mountain . . . weddings, funerals.

“The following year, 2005, I asked: ‘Please, can I do films?’

“Films? My family, and my mom, Nombulelo Yamiso, they didn’t get this films thing.”

Would she survive Sin City, eGoli, the reeking ghoul? It’s a long way from Grahamstown for a “shy speaker”.

“My uncle said, ‘When do you want to leave?’ I replied: ‘Tomorrow’.”

Fast-forward 12 years to March 2017 and a film Matiwana wrote and directed, The Bicycle Man, wins the Silver Stallion and the EU’s Africa, Caribbean, Pacific award at the Pan-African Film and