In 2006 Portobello Productions set up a new collaboration with Golden Bear award-winning director Mark Dornford-May to produce theatre and film projects focused on South African talent for an international audience.

A number of projects are in development including film and theatre adaptations of new and classic texts seen through a South African prism and set within a South African environment.

The collaboration complements Portobello's slate of international projects for stage and screen and is part of South African born Eric Abraham's commitment to promoting South African film and theatre achievements in the international arena.

Mark Dornford-May has been a theatre and opera director for over twenty-five years. He has worked in South Africa for the last four years creating the lyric theatre company Dimpho Di Kopane and was responsible for directing all their stage productions including the hugely successful staging of Carmen and Yiimimangaliso The Mysteries.

U-CARMEN EKHAYELITSHA was Dornford-May's first feature film. He was nominated as Outstanding Director of a Musical for the 2005 Drama Desk Awards; received the Golden Bear for Best Film in Berlin 2005; received the award for Best Feature at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles; and was awarded a Golden Thumb by America's Pulitzer Prize winning film critic Roger Ebert. His second film SON OF MAN received the founders prize at the Traverse City Film Festival presented by Michael Moore who described the film 'as one of the most beautiful and subversive films of the decade'.