JAN Season 2 nominated for a SAFTA
My team and I are delighted to share the news that JAN Season 2 has been nominated for a SAFTA (South African Film and Television Award) for ‘Best Lifestyle Programme’. Thank you to my co-production team at Brainwave Productions who are without a doubt the best team to work with! The awards ceremony takes place on 22 May 2021, and we’re holding all our thumbs until then.
When we made the JAN TV show, it was uncharted territory for me, so I was absolutely overwhelmed by people’s responses. Some of our viewers actually toured every place we featured in the show! And when we won a SAFTA for Best Variety Show at the 2019 awards ceremony for Season 1, I couldn’t have been more humbled to have received this kind of recognition from my fellow South Africans in the film industry.
And now, you all might ask… when is season three coming out? The good news: it’s just around the corner!
ABOUT THE SAFTAS
The South African Film and Television Awards (SAFTA) were established in 2005 by a group of South Africa’s top filmmakers to honour, celebrate and promote the amazing talent in our film industry. The three-pronged trophy is called the “Golden Horn”, whose three heads symbolise collective effort, community, and the recognition of the individual as part of the team (the cornerstone of the African philosophy of Ubuntu).
“Our industry is immensely talented and, as a country, we have such an abundance of rich stories to tell. I feel so proud and honoured to have been given the chance to share my story, and to have received this kind of recognition from my fellow South Africans!” says Jan Hendrik van der Westhuizen, whose journey to Michelin stardom is depicted in the first season of JAN.
WHEN JAN WENT TO THE SILVER SCREEN
Season 1 débuted on VIA, a predominantly Afrikaans-language channel on DStv (Sub-Saharan Africa’s leading broadcast satellite service) in 2017. But the show’s universal story of a young South African chef who journeyed to France to pursue his culinary dream, becoming his country’s first Michelin-star chef, soon attracted a diverse range of viewers from South Africa and beyond.
THE DREAM TEAM BEHIND THE SHOW
Brainwave Productions, the multiple-award-winning team behind the production of JAN, first approached Jan Hendrik with an idea for the show in 2016. “It was meant to be,” says Carien Loubser, the show’s executive producer. “We met on another set where we first talked about the idea of doing something together. After that, I met with Jan Hendrik at his house in Cape Town and we started shooting four months later. I think the winning recipe with this show was that it was always very important to us to give Jan Hendrik as much creative freedom as possible, which really allowed us to capture the reality of his life in a very natural, unscripted way.”
