Ember
Productions

Lika Berning is a South African writer-director-producer with over 20 years’ experience in front of and behind the camera. She wrote and directed the award-winning short film Vashou-Ding (2014), and co-directed and produced the documentary Bettie: Portrait of an Artist (2012). She went on to direct and produce the feature film #Lovemyselfie for Multichoice, managing its theatrical release campaign.

Lika has been selected for a number of prestigious international labs: the Torino Film Lab Script Editing programme (2026), the Triggerfish and UNESCO Directors Lab for animation (2025), and the EAVE Creative Producers Lab (2018).

In 2024 Ember Productions received development funding for a feature film co-production between the NFVF and the Nederlands Filmfonds through the Thuthuka Fund. The film is titled The Captain’s Daughter.

As an actress, Lika has held leading roles in South African feature films and series including Liefling, Vrou Soek Boer, Bang Bang Club and French Toast, a foundation that gives her a rare, ground-level understanding of the creative process across every stage of a production, from story inception to distribution.

Lika is also a passionate social entrepreneur. In 2017 she founded iKasi Creative Media, feeding her knowledge and experience back into rural youth to build employability pathways into the film and digital media industry.

My creative approach begins in the body before it reaches the page. Having worked for many years as an actress, I understand story first through character, through the emotional logic of a human being under pressure, and what that pressure reveals.

This shapes how I develop projects as a producer: I am drawn to material that trusts its audience, that sits with complexity rather than resolving it too quickly, and that finds its power in what is left unspoken as much as what is said. I believe in the intelligence of collaboration, that a story is not diminished by the many hands that shape it, but made more true.

I am interested in the Global South not as a setting but as a perspective; in women’s interiority as a cinematic language; and in history not as a backdrop but as a mirror held up to the present. I try to keep an element of play in the process, because I have found that the most alive moments in any project, on set, in the edit, in a development conversation, arrive when people feel free enough to be surprised by what emerges.

Clyde graduated from the University of Cape Town with a degree in Theatre & Performance. He then went on to play Laertes in Hamlet, Eros in Antony & Cleopatra, Slim in Cowboy Mouth, Mark Dolson in Mass Appeal, Dakin in The History Boys, and more recently, Nick Arnstein in Funny Girl. Clyde won a Naledi award for his role as Dakin in The History Boys (2011).

He has also appeared in local and international series and films such as Raised by Wolves (2020), Black Sails (2017), Dominion (2015), Cape Town (2015), Known Gods (2005), Montana, The Mating Game and Shooting Stars.

Clyde will be appearing in the following upcoming productions: Death of a Whistleblower, Hunting Jessica Brok, and King George (directed by Ari Kruger).

His writing credits include the story for Queenstown Kings, which was funded by the NFVF and made for Netflix by director Jahmil Qubeka.

Clyde Berning on IMDb ↗