Warriors of the most special kind
Michael Lessac’s film about the effects of conflict focuses on forgiveness, writes Tymon Smith
AT the 35th Durban International Film Festival, which opens next week, you can watch a documentary that is the culmination of more than a decade’s investigation into the difficulties of reconciliation and the scars that trauma leaves on the psyche — not only of people in South Africa, but also in Rwanda, Northern Ireland and the Balkans.
Directed by US theatre, film and television director Michael Lessac, the documentary is a multilayered exploration of issues that began with Lessac’s interest in the interpreters who, for two-and-a-half years, translated the pain and anguish of others at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
In 2003, Lessac took a group of interpreters on a retreat to discuss how their work had affected them and used footage of these discussions as the basis for the creation of a workshopped theatre piece that became Truth in Translation —a production that went on to tour 11 countries, 26 cities, played to 55 000 people and facilitated workshops with 10 000 people.
The documentary of this process and its effects — not just on the audiences who watched the play, but also on the troupe of actors who performed it — is called A Snake Gives Birth to a Snake, premiering in Durban next week.
The original troupe of South African actors who workshopped the play over three years and form the basis of the documentary included Quanita Adams, Nick Boraine, Andrew Buckland, Sibulele Gcilitshana, Bongani Gumede, Fana Mokoena and Thembi Mtshali-Jones.
Hugh Masekela composed the music.
The troupe were, in Lessac’s eyes, “a very special group of South African actors . . . who were warriors of the most special kind. They allowed themselves to travel through worlds that were often more painful than their worst nightmares.”
The difficulties of dealing with the suffering and public cleansing of the commission process could not just be dealt with on stage and then left behind. This emerges in the documentary and there are moments when the actors, after constantly dealing with issues of reconciliation and differences between people on stage, turn on each other, exposing their everyday prejudices and personalities in their dressing rooms.
Speaking on the phone from the US, Lessac said he never expected this to have happened, having believed that his troupe were “invincible”. Perhaps, he said, part of the problem was that he had not considered that the play he and the group had created had “11 people on stage and only the white people were speaking their first language”.
As a New Yorker, Lessac admits that the notion of forgiveness was “soft” for him. “I thought the idea of a play about it was soft, but once I spoke to the interpreters, I suddenly thought what would happen if people couldn’t turn away no matter what they were hearing? How did they survive that channelling of other people’s lives with such grace and elegance?”
When Lessac and the troupe took Truth in Translation to countries that had violent histories without any kind of truth commission, such as Rwanda, Northern Ireland or the Balkans, he was nervous about the responses of people.
Lessac recalls how he was “surprised” in Rwanda.
“We thought we would be killed by the audience, who would want to know who the hell we thought we were. But it was quite the reverse. In the film, a 15-year-old girl told us about how she is able to forgive the people who killed her whole family, people whom she lives among. We walked out of there speechless.”
During workshops with communities in the Balkans, Lessac was “trying to talk about something that happened 20 years ago, and they say you can never understand it unless you understand what happened 800 years ago”.
Although the documentary does not provide pat answers or a how-to-forgive guide, it shows the many different ways in which humans deal and sometimes do not deal with histories of violence. Lessac hopes viewers will come away understanding that even with a process such as the truth commission “you can’t feel good. It’s not that easy and maybe forgiveness and reconciliation are silly words, but they are powerful ones. Whatever you think of the TRC, it was done and you guys are the only ones who ever did it.”