Andrew Worsdale
AT a home-spun award ceremony this week held at the SABC, Mail & Guardian Television’s Harriet Gavshon, Dingaan Thomas Kapa and miner Lucky Mnceke, as well as SABC1’s commissioning editor for documentaries Pat Kelly, were presented with awards by acting manager of SABC1, Theo Erasmus.
Ghetto Diaries, that enabled ordinary people to record their own lives with a video camera, was honoured with the Prix Sud-Nord as part of the Rencontres Media Nord-Sud Festival based in Geneva and as the Pierre Alain Donner Prize from Swiss-French Television.
The award-winning episode traced the lives of Mnceke, a Gauteng miner, and his wife Nombasa, who lives in the Transkei with their two daughters.
Erasmus said: “This is the kind of television South Africans should be enjoying on a daily basis.” But the shyest of the recipients had to be Mnceke who had been intercepted by producer/overseer Dingaan Kapa to attend the event. Plainly nervous, Mnceke said that he soon realised that the camera was just a tool to record his life.
With more training Mnceke would like to make more films and all of the gathering believed he has the talent to do so.