U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha is a transposition to a black township outside Cape Town of Bizet's Carmen, in which the heroine remains a worker in a cigarette factory. Escamillo becomes a black singer educated on a scholarship in New York and, instead of killing a bull in the ring, he helps in the ritual slaughter of an ox to honour his father. The film, made in Xhosa, one of the chief South African languages, is the work of two Europeans educated in Britain, director Mark Dornford-May, and musical director Charles Hazlewood. It's a ragged, watchable piece, but much inferior to the magnificent Otto Preminger-Oscar Hammerstein Carmen Jones. Maybe it should have been called 'Me Mérimée, U Carmen'.