Liza Key

Liza Key died in Johannesburg on 11 October 2026, at the age of 71, after suffering from brain cancer, according to her obituary in the Daily Maverick. The University of Cape Town Libraries, which holds her archive, recorded the date as 10 October. She died at the Parkview home she shared with Janice Honeyman. Tributes came from colleagues including Weekly Mail founding editor Anton Harber, filmmaker Harriet Gavshon and journalist Charlotte Bauer, who called her a dizzying disruptor of anything considered politely appropriate.

Liza Jane Key was born in 1954 and grew up in Witbank in the Eastern Transvaal, now part of Mpumalanga. She was schooled at a convent, where by her friends' accounts she was often in trouble, and went on to the University of Natal. Before finishing her degree she left to see the world, working as a ship's hand. She arrived in Johannesburg in the mid 1980s and was drawn into the city's alternative film scene.

Key took the reins of the Weekly Mail Film Festival in 1988, a year after it was founded by the anti-apartheid newspaper the Weekly Mail, and directed it for seven years alongside programme director Trevor Steele Taylor. With the festival's lawyer, Lauren Jacobson, she argued each year before the Publications Appeal Board for exemptions to screen banned films, and screenings were followed by debates that sometimes included the censors themselves. With the support of the exiled ANC's cultural figures, she brought filmmakers including Paul Schrader, Costa Gavras and Peter Greenaway to South Africa, and the festival's short film competition helped launch a new generation of South African filmmakers. In 1993 she and her team staged Limits of Liberty, an anti-censorship festival at the Wits Theatre.

After funding dried up following the 1994 elections, Key became a documentary director. A Question of Madness (also known as The Furiousus), produced by her brother Philip Key for Key Films and narrated with David Beresford, was a 52 minute portrait of Dimitri Tsafendas, the man who assassinated Hendrik Verwoerd in 1966. It was shown at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in 1999. The Man Who Knew Too Much (2002) followed Wouter Basson, the head of South Africa's chemical weapons programme, who was acquitted in 2002. She made around ten films in all, some as episodes of series, including a film about David Kramer that led to her later master's degree in ethnomusicology on Karoo musicians.

From 1998 she convened Scrawl, annual screenwriting workshops at Monkey Valley near Noordhoek in Cape Town, where emerging writers worked with tutors from abroad; the actor Alan Rickman was among those who took part and became a friend. Her final project was the research and writing for Mandy Jacobson's seven part documentary series The Trials of Winnie Mandela, released on Netflix.

Friends described Key as intensely shy in public, to the point that she could not make speeches, but a generous and lively host at home, where she cooked for artists, journalists and filmmakers and played Schubert on the piano. Her relationship with the theatre and film director Janice Honeyman began in 2001, and the couple lived in Parkview, Johannesburg, and Pringle Bay in the Western Cape. She spent much of her last years in Pietermaritzburg caring for her mother, Marian, who died in 2026. She was survived by Honeyman and by her brothers Philip and Gordon Key and their families.

Key's Weekly Mail Film Festival is remembered as one of the defining cultural events of transition era Johannesburg, a place where banned work reached the public and where debates about censorship and freedom of expression were tested in practice. Her research on Tsafendas brought renewed attention to a largely forgotten prisoner and informed Harris Dousemetzis's biography The Man Who Killed Apartheid. Her papers, together with an archive of close to 250 films connected to the Weekly Mail Film Festival, are preserved at the University of Cape Town Libraries.