The Turn, Taxi Violence’s latest music video offering, won two awards at the Wirral International Film Festival held in the UK in October – best director of music video 2010 (Ryan Kruger) and Vesbin award best actor 2010 (Phillip Holtz).
The video of this Cape Town band, plays out like a short film, rather than a standard music video.
Taxi Violence ran a competition asking their fans to send in video concepts for the title track off their second album, The Turn. After going through all the entries, the band decided that the best concept submitted was by young actor and director Ryan Kruger. He has filmed with bands such as Juliet Lewis and the Licks, Black Flag, The Misfits, Slipknot and many more before coming to South Africa in 2008. Ryan has also recently won an award for Best International short film at Latina Documenta Film Festival in Italy for ‘The screen behind the mirror’.
Phillip Hotz, also affectionately know as ‘Papa Smurf’, has been a big fan of Taxi Violence for a long time and can also regularly be spotted at their gigs.
“I met Philip Hotz a couple of years ago at one of our shows at Zula Bar in Cape Town. It was a crazy show and people were going wild. About half way through, I suddenly saw this small elderly dude going absolutely crazy in the front row. He introduced himself afterwards as, “Papa Smurf or Papa G. I’m not crazy, just crazy on the dance floor”.
“About a year later, I saw Philip in one of Van Coke Kartel’s videos and immediately remembered him. You don’t easily forget a character like him. After we decided that Ryan Kruger would be the winner of our video competition, we met with him and he presented his show reel. Not surprisingly, Philip was the lead character in one of his short films. Ryan loves working with Philip and insisted that he plays the lead role in The Turn. It was a brilliant decision. Not only does he appear well on camera, but he also made the story more believable.” – Louis Nel (Taxi Violence)
