Celebrating the power of women through film
THE Encounters South African International Documentary Film Festival, now in its 20th year, celebrates the power of womanhood, with more than half of the 40 films chosen featuring female directors.
Many of them focus on women who have made an indelible mark on history – from Thuli Madonsela to the women who marched on the Union Buildings in 1956 to protest against the pass laws. This along with a host of other heroines who, against the odds, won their own battles.
Whispering Truth To Power is human rights lawyer Shameela Seedat’s powerful breakthrough as a film-maker. It tracks Madonsela, our first female public protector, as she builds her second case against former president Jacob Zuma. In the story about her, her office and her children, the film sensitively navigates the status quo in South Africa, tracking the various contested lines in the dual battle against corruption and inequality.
Seedat comments: “Post-apartheid South Africa has thrown out a messy and complex reality that we, here at home, are keen to confront. I’m keen to bring another type of African character to the international documentary audience. A strong, super-lawyer woman in a position of power.” The opening night film comes hot on the heels of scooping the Special Jury International Documentary Prize at Hot Docs, Toronto’s holy grail of documentary film festivals.
Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist is video artist Lorna Tucker’s first film, and offers a fascinating (and definitive) look at the life, fashion and activism of one of Britain’s most iconic and original designers. The film premiered at this year’s Sundance festival and offers an entertaining, yet intimate and poignant, homage to Dame Vivienne Westwood.
The extraordinary strength of women is witnessed in Xoliswa Sithole’s moving Standing On Their Shoulders. The starting point of this exploration of the women’s movement skilfully records the 1956 march by 20 000 women to the Union Buildings to protest against the pass laws. Its premiere at the festival comes after featuring in Encounters Rough Cut Lab last year, and it poignantly features surviving member of the March’s organisers, Sophia Williams de Bruyn.
Karin Slater’s inspiring film Sisters of the Wilderness is set in iMfolozi, the oldest game park in Africa where five young Zulu women from underprivileged backgrounds embark – for the first time in their lives – on a journey of self-discovery, which offers them an opportunity to grow and heal. The journey serves as a reminder that we are intimately linked to nature and what we do to nature, we do to ourselves.
Not In My Neighbourhood was born in Cape Town when filmmaker Kurt Orderson documented residents facing eviction in Woodstock and Salt River to make way for development and gentrification. Best referred to as film activism, the project took more than three years as Orderson followed the anti-gentrification and police brutality monitoring collective #copwatch in New York; the rise to power of real estate mogul Donald Trump; the occupation movements in São Paulo; the legacy of apartheid spatial planning and modern-day gentrification experienced by Woodstock communities. This fascinating and explosive movie makes connections through intergenerational stories of people fighting for the right to their cities.
This Is Congo shows a brutal conflict of another kind – photojournalist Daniel McCabe’s immersive and unfiltered look into the world’s longest continuing war and the people involved. Using four characters – a whistle-blower, a patriotic military commander, a mineral dealer and a displaced tailor – the award-winning film showcases the tragic history of the region with blistering effectiveness.
Fresh from its world premiere at April’s Tribeca Film Festival is Tanzania Transit, Jeroen van Velzen’s thought-provoking road movie that follows three people on a train journey across Tanzania. Each has overcome serious hardships, yet they seem unable to keep up with the fast-changing society around them.
On a lighter note, Pluck! A Film Not Just About Chicken, is Lloyd Ross and Joëlle Chesselet’s funky investigation into Nando’s marketing campaigns, and Akin Omotoso’s penetrating and insightful The Colour of Wine shows the changing face of the South African wine industry.
And on a final note, in Life Is Wonderful: Mandela’s Unsung Heroes, former English high court judge Sir Nicholas Stadlen throws light onto the extraordinary people involved in the Rivonia Trial, through groundbreaking and never-before-seen interviews. Their stories and the stories of the anti-apartheid Struggle show the power of people’s ideals to enable them to create the world as it should be, not accepting it as it is.
The Encounters documentary film festival takes place from May 31 to June 10 in Cape Town at the Labia, the Nouveau V&A Waterfront and Bertha Movie House, Isivivana Centre in Khayelitsha, and in Joburg at the Bioscope and the Nouveau Rosebank.
For more information and for the complete programme, see www. encounters.co.za or https://www. facebook.com/EncountersDocFest/