Ot in my neighbourhood
organic ice cream and cold-pressed juices alongside security guards pushing protesters away. A Woodstock Hub promotional video speaks about “bringing residents back to the area”.
With a blend of drone aerial shots we are transported to Brooklyn. Here we meet entire families of activists. Old methods of struggle come up against new imperatives.
“I remember when Amadou Diallo got shot,” one mother says, recalling the 1999 New York Police Department murder of the unarmed Senegalese immigrant. “I’ve been an activist ever since. And now I go harder because I’ve got two boys.”
We meet Safiya Agostini and her son Darian, who can’t cross the street from his Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment “without getting touched” by the police.
In later scenes, we see Darian (probably no older than 28) sharing methodologies of struggle and their ideological underpinnings with a group of his peers inside a community centre. We see copwatchers, looking Pantheresque but reserved about their documentation of police behaviour in their neighbourhoods.
Orderson, who has been looking at themes of land, belonging and displacement through his body of work for more than a decade, has evolved an aesthetic that recognises the brutality of his subjects’ lives without portraying them as helpless.
It is very much about “how the camera moves and how the characters allow the camera to move. It’s not about me going: ‘Can you stand here, I just want to shoot you doing this.’ It is about having people in their space and me moving around them and to best represent them —visually and aesthetically and their politics as well.”
The exhaustive research conducted during the course of making this film means that, as the viewer watches, visual cues and additional text connect what is happening in the contemporary realm with its historical foundations.
Apartheid spatial planning is evoked by Blikkiesdorp, a tin shack township about 25km from Cape Town city centre established in 2007 as a temporary relocation settlement. As townships are labour camps, new developers see the residents of Woodstock as not being pushed out into oblivion but as a ready-made labour pool.
Belinda Walker, a spatial planner who works for the City of Cape Town, is filmed saying: “The people that make curry and koeksusters that live in Woodstock are not going to leave Woodstock. They are going to be catering to the nice restaurants and coffee shops that are springing up.”
It’s all very Magda Wierzycka, if you ask me, the true colour of money.
Echoing from Brooklyn, I hear Darian Agostini say: “With capitalism, it already supposes that one person is going to be better than the other.”