South African creatives and storytellers are the focus of a new Women’s Month campaign on Apple TV. The work of Micaela Kleinsmith (My Kind of Country), Jodi Balfour (For All Mankind) and Lou Llobell (Foundation) are the three filmmakers highlighted throughout the month of August.
Micaela Kleinsmith showed a penchant for songwriting from the tender age of 14, and after a successful stint on SA Idols in 2016, went on to perform across almost every stage in and around Cape Town in order to hone her live skills. Her onstage vigour served her well as a contestant on the first season of Apple TV+’s My Kind of Country, as Micaela was first championed by masked country South African singer Orville Peck, before going on to be crowned the winner.
Jodi Balfour graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre & Performance at the University of Cape Town, before relocating to Canada and finally settling in Los Angeles, California. As Ellen Wilson in Apple TV+’s drama, For All Mankind, Jodi plays a budding engineer, who becomes one of NASA’s first female astronauts before fiercely pursuing a political career in season 3 that sees her elected as the nation’s 41st president in 1992.
London-based actress, Lou Llobell, grew up in South Africa after her Zimbabwean mother and Spanish father relocated to Pietermaritzburg when she was eight years old. In Apple TV+’s sci-fi series Foundation she portrays Gaal Dornick, a brilliant mathematical prodigy from the repressed water planet of Synnax. Recruited by Hari Seldon, Gaal becomes an integral part of his plan to preserve civilization.
The three women were selected for their ability to “harnesses their innate strength, stirs us to action and inspire us to imagine.” A curation of content has been selected to channel these Women in Power on Apple TV for Women’s Month in August, you can find it here.