A TV documentary series puts township residents behind the camera, writes HAZEL FRIEDMAN
THERE’S a poignant scene in Ghetto Diaries where an unemployed man articulates his dreams of moving from his cramped cement house into one built from bricks. “Maybe I’ll build a swimming pool and tennis court. Move away from the smells and dirt. But these days, one day is just like another. There is nothing to wake up for.”
This plaintive soliloquy encapsulates the emptiness of life in a place where great expectations more often than not yield small change. Yet wending its way through the despair is a thread of hope that — even amid the desolation — dreams do not die.
And this is particularly true for the makers of Ghetto Diaries. According to producer Teboho Mahlatsi, a writer, Free Filmmakers graduate and recent recruit to Mail & Guardian Television, Ghetto Diaries is “about people who live in a township environment, how they perceive it, define themselves and tell their stories in their own words, as if writing their everyday experiences in a diary”.
While the thematic refrain of Ghetto Diaries might sound familiar, the process of putting the series together has been nothing short of groundbreaking. Inspired in part by Britain’s Channel Four television’s Video Diaries, Mahlatsi has departed from the traditions of conventional documentary television by comissioning a series of four films shot entirely by township residents who had never used a video camera before.
Each week Ghetto Diaries showcases stories made entirely by these film-makers: an ex- gangster and an unmarried mother; an ambitious high-school student and her unemployed father; a policeman; an eccentric ex-prisoner with a predilection for opera; a taxi driver and a matric pupil.
“It was an incredible experience introducing them to the camera, training them for two weeks and leaving them to their own thing for a week. What came out of the experiment was astonishing,” recalls Mahlatsi. “I usually exert tight control over my work, but this time I had to suspend any attempts at directorial intervention and allow them to express their stories in their own way.”
The results — given the film-makers’ inexperience (or maybe because of it) — are astonishing. Obviously the stories and filming techniques are crude and fragmented, but these qualities augment their raw honesty and reflect the grittiness of ghetto life. And with each programme the stories attain greater coherence.
For example, the second episode reveals the conflicting perspectives of an ambitious student and her father — an intelligent, articulate man whose spirit has been bowed by years of unemployment. Father and daughter seem to speak a diferent language: he cannot understand her hunger for knowledge, and she resents what she regards as his indigence. Yet both father and daughter have similar dreams: to graduate from a cement house to one made of bricks; and both believe that leaving the township means an instant passport to self- reinvention.
Yet there are those who accept the frustrations of township existence, like the teenage unmarried mother with the voice of a nightingale and the spirit of a Trojan. Pregnant by a man who subsequently died, she readily acknowledges her unpreparedness for motherhood. Yet her love for her child — her “best friend” — is clearly evident in the way the camera lingers lovingly on her face, inducing a toothless grin from the infant.
But Ghetto Diaries offers far more than a slice of township life. In an industry still plagued by the imbalances of the past, it has penetrated the cracks of society and extracted new talent bursting with stories that need to be told. Until now, few have been willing to listen.
Ghetto Diaries is to be screened on SABC1 at 7pm on Tuesdays. Episode one is on March 5