Carrying barbecue tongs and sausages, thousands of hungry South Africans, determined to break a world record, gathered Thursday, on a national holiday, to participate in an attempt to record the largest number of people grilling food at the same time.
The number that participants seek to exceed is 2,220 people, and was recorded in the Japanese city of Ishigaki in 2023.
The Associated Press reported that the South Africans, who failed in a similar attempt last year, flocked to a sports stadium in the capital, Pretoria, and took their positions around about 500 barbecue stations. Organizers said they expect about 3,000 people to participate.
According to the strict rules explained by a Guinness World Records judge who supervised the attempt, all participants must continue grilling at the same time for a period of no less than 5 minutes in order to be counted within the record.
“If anyone leaves, they will be disqualified from the attempt,” said judge Polina Sabinska, who wore a blue jacket and tie and carried a notepad as she watched the sausages and burgers being grilled.
Cooking meat outdoors over wood, charcoal or gas fires is a popular tradition among South Africans, as is the case in the United States, Australia and other places around the world.
This tradition is known in South Africa as “Brai”, and one of its most famous foods is the thick, rolled sausages, known as “Buriwars”. That is, “farmers’ sausage.” But participants also grilled burgers, steaks and other cuts in an attempt to break the record.
The group barbecue took place on “Heritage Day,” a national holiday during which South Africans, with their racial and cultural diversity, are encouraged to highlight and celebrate their heritage.
This day has become known unofficially as “Bray Day,” as the love of barbecue brings people together across the country, and many South Africans celebrate it by holding similar parties.
Participant Alex Coetzee said that he also participated in the attempt to break the record in 2025, when South Africa failed to achieve it. Due to a large number of participants leaving their positions around the grills.
“Things will be better this time,” added Coetzee, who wore a T-shirt in the colors of the South African flag. We will actually break the world record. “The South Africans will be the record holders, and that is the most important thing.”
But has this year's attempt matured as it should have, or has it gone up in smoke?
Guinness judge Sabinska kept the country on edge, saying she and other officials were still reviewing the evidence, and a final decision on whether South Africa broke the world record for the largest barbecue may not come until Friday.
Former US President Barack Obama reflected on his experience with fatherhood, speaking about the differences he noticed in his relationship with his two daughters, and noting that his family life might have been different if he had had a son. In a frank talk about the complex relationship between parents and children, Obama also recalled an aspect of his relationship with his grandfather, which left a deep impact on his view of fatherhood and care.
Obama's speech came during his discussion of the topic of fatherhood with actor Tom Hanks, in the first episode of his new podcast program, “A Great Book with Barack Obama,” in which he reviews a number of books that had an important impact on his life.
The former president (65 years old) discussed the experience of raising his two daughters, Malia (28 years old) and Sasha (25 years old), with his wife, Michelle Obama. According to the Independent newspaper, his program devotes space to discussing books and the ideas and personal experiences they raise for Obama and his guests.
Hanks was the first guest on the program, as he discussed with Obama the novel “Gilead” by Marilyn Robinson, a novel that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, and deals with the themes of death, empathy, and the complex relationship between parents and children.
In the episode that aired Thursday, the two men discussed a passage from the novel in which Robinson reflects on how people can love each other deeply, despite their sometimes inability to understand each other. “A man may know his father, or his son,” Robinson wrote, “and yet there may remain between them nothing but loyalty, love, and mutual misunderstanding.”
Commenting on this quote, Obama began his speech by saying: “I do not have a son.”
Then he said to Hanks: “You know my daughters.” "I've always said, and I can't say for sure, but I think that raising a son would have been more difficult for me than raising a daughter."
Obama, who served as US President from 2009 to 2017, explained that there is, in his opinion, “some way to bridge that gap in understanding” with girls. He added that his relationship with his two daughters does not include the same kind of struggle for influence, or what he described as the “den-protecting instinct” that may appear, according to his experience, in the relationship between fathers and their male children.
Obama then moved on to talk about his personal experience with the men who played fatherly roles in his life, recalling his relationship with his grandfather, saying: “I did not know my father personally, but I knew my grandfather. He was a complex character. “I loved him, but I didn’t understand him, and he didn’t understand me either.”
He added: “There are fond feelings and wonderful memories, but I had, on some fundamental level, a feeling of wondering: Who is this man?”
Obama's parents divorced when he was two years old, and he was raised by his mother, Anne, and his maternal grandparents, Stanley and Madeleine Dunham, in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Obama pointed out that his relationship with his grandfather turned over time into what he described as a “practical lesson” in the things that should be avoided when a person assumes the role of caregiver.
Saudi director and cinematographer Bilal Al Badr returned from Los Angeles in 2017, with a lesson in mind that has stayed with him throughout his five years of working in Hollywood: Good equipment is not enough to make a good movie. First, there must be a story whose creator knows its world and details. When he completed “Gum” after about two years of writing and preparation, he tested that lesson with a Saudi story in which he bet on the human being before the image.
Shakespeare writes "Sheila"
The first rule Al-Badr learned during his studies in Los Angeles is that the story, or scenario, comes before everything else. He says: “From the beginning of my study of cinema, the focus was on the artist’s connection with himself and his culture, and to tell the stories he knows and feels.”
He adds: “I remember the first lesson in the principles of directing, when the professor said: I cannot direct a Japanese film; Because I have not visited Japan and do not speak its language. This sentence stayed with me; Because I believe that cinema, in its simplest definition, is about telling a story with light. You cannot tell a story whose details you do not know, or as I like to say: Do not answer (bring) Shakespeare writes (Sheila).”
Al-Badr confirms that during the 5 years he spent in Hollywood, he found that many of the films he worked on were made with much less equipment and studios than what is available locally today, but the greatest interest was in the writing and the story. He adds: “Sometimes the opposite happens with us. We start with the camera, the studio, and the technology, then we look for the story.”
He continues: “If there is one thing that remains with me from that experience, it is that achieving universality does not happen by imitating others, nor by letting others tell our stories. Universality comes when we tell our own stories; From our culture and identity, and this is what Korean cinema did when it made its stories local in their origins, but global in their reach.”
“Gum”...a bet on humanity
Bilal Al-Badr sees in the movie “Gum” the milestone that took him from making the picture to owning a cinematic project. He produced the film at his expense, and called it “Zakat on Art,” and he spent about two years preparing it.
He chose a child with Down Syndrome to star in the love story, and was keen to present him as a hero who leads the events. There is no situation that calls for the viewer's pity. He says: “I focused on him as the hero of a movie,” adding: “He was the one leading the narration of the story.”
He says: “I think that (Alaka), which won 7 awards and more than 35 festival nominations, succeeded in reaching the world, but it did not succeed to the same extent in conveying its message to the film sector in Saudi Arabia: that you can reach the world with simple capabilities, if you focus on the story and present something real that stems from your culture and identity.”
The Saudi director's interest in humanity extended; From the characters in his films to those who stand in front of his camera... In “The Story of a Man,” an episode in which a delivery man appeared achieved more than a million views in less than 24 hours. Then the representative called asking to delete it, even though he agreed to film it, and Al-Badr responded immediately.
He says that, on another occasion, his team prepared a material that included delivery representatives who spoke to him, but he refrained from publishing it after they refused to appear in it. He explains this by saying: “The person is more important than the content, and I do not want to exploit anyone to create an episode or achieve views.”
An image that serves the story
The full moon does not give the camera the right to drive the film. In “Siwar,” which he shot cinematically, he links the limited camera movement to the calm rhythm of the story. He says: “In (Siwar), we were telling the story in a calm, dramatic rhythm, and therefore the camera movement was calculated and limited. The question for me is not: Why is the camera moving? Rather: Why are you moving now?
He adds: “From the beginning of the film, the visual style was clear; The camera documents the story, and does not get too close to it and does not move too far away except when there is a motive in the story. The camera moved when an event called for action, and stagnated when it was her turn to watch. Too much camera movement and the movement loses its meaning.”
In response to a question about the first decision he would make if he returned to his beginnings, Al-Badr says: “I will stop trying to follow the trend and imitate the successes of others. I will start from my culture and identity, and from the human stories that move me and resemble me, and I will search for stories that are close to me. About the people and the details that I know and feel, and then I try to narrate them in my own way.”
Al-Badr plans for his next project to stem from Saudi stories that can be conveyed to the world. He says: “I want to make a film that resembles us, that carries our culture, and at the same time be able to compete at the box office and reach a global audience.”
He believes that the Kingdom today includes a new generation of filmmakers, talents who have studied cinema and lived different experiences, along with an audience that has changed a lot.
