The Discovery Channel will show films made by South Africans in its upcoming South African Visions series, reports Janet Smith
Isicathamiya is not only about singing in perfect harmony, wearing white gloves and a three-piece suit. It is also about heartbreak and love and survival, as viewers in the process of re-educating themselves about this country will discover when they watch Discovery Channel’s South African Visions series, starting on the satellite service on Monday April 27.
The series includes a firebrand close encounter with taxi bosses, a probe into the black middle class, a scrum with a Bo-Kaap schoolboy rugby team, a debate on elephant culling and an invigorating story of women digging their heels into the gold and coal mining industry.
As a collection of true-life tales stretching from the Cape to the Northern Province, South African Visions is exceptional. In that it used the talents of six young South African directors, it is also a rarity in world television. The film-makers are Msizi Kuhlane (Ghetto Diaries), Munier Parker, Robbie Thorpe, Palesa Nkosi (director of the Africa Dreaming film, Mamlambo), Junaid Ahmed and Thulani Mokoena, award-winning director of the 1994 television election special My Vote is My Secret.
Mokoena’s film, Taxi Wars, has gained the most praise from his colleagues on the project. He was invited to take the film to the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam last December where it played to packed houses after generating acclaim on its first screening on Discovery Europe, also in December.
Purposely scheduled to premiere in Italy and Africa via MultiChoice DStv on Monday April 27 – an occasion Discovery Europe publicists erroneously describe as South African independence day – South African Visions was intended to present viewers abroad with new interpretations of this country.
There’s little doubt that Thorpe’s A Time to Cull? – an investigation into the possibilities for control of the elephant population in the Kruger National Park – has already and will continue to attract attention for its wildlife content. Yet the channel is also convinced its audience appreciates the opportunity for a close encounter with a South Africa they barely know.
South African series producers Jeremy Nathan and Brenda Goldblatt worked closely with Chris Haws, Discovery Europe’s vice-president of commissions, production and co-production on the project that was designed to document “the cutting edge of life on the southern tip of Africa”. Certainly most South Africans would feel uncomfortable calling an isicathamiya choir in Durban “cutting edge”, and would only dare use the expression with a deep sense of irony in reference to taxi wars. Goldblatt makes the point that the films rather realise an “incredible intimacy – told from the inside”.
It is, of course, the work itself, the quality of South African Visions, which should be regarded as cutting edge in an environment where the SABC seems to be moving further and further away from presenting real film- makers with an independent voice to its public.
Blood and Guts (April 28 at 8pm), the story of schoolboys fuelled by their passion for Islam and rugby, presents a portrait of a community close to its director’s heart. Since Munier Parker’s private and compelling history has been spent in the Bo-Kaap area in which the documentary was made, his depiction of a distinctive society arrives out of his own experience. A participant in a Department of Justice rehab programme, Parker narrowly escaped a jail sentence for car theft, yet he also emerged out of prejudice and poverty as an activist and community film-maker of promise.
Made with uncompromising affection, The Zulu Messengers (April 28 at 8.30pm) – Ahmed’s entertaining, poignant profile of an a cappella hostel choir – does not only seek to promote understanding of the double life of migrant labourers, as so many other documentaries have done. Using the camera especially to gaze on faces and the detail of costume, the director captures the critical essence of the ritual surrounding isicathamiya.
Xoliswa Vanda, Kumeshnee Naidoo, Elisna Coetsee and Amelia Holtzhausen are the so-called trailblazers who provided an entirely new story for Palesa Nkosi’s documentary, The Golden Girls (April 29 at 8pm) which explores the subject of women as players in the politically fraught environment of mining. Despite its universal appeal in flying the flag for women’s power in industry, Nkosi’s documentary could have its most vigorous public response when the series is screened on SABC3 in June.
Meanwhile, some critics have already described The Golden Girls – which is essentially a group of portraits – as the most authored, vivid and individual of the films, reflecting Nkosi’s profound talent.
Robbie Thorpe – who has gained a fine reputation in film-making circles primarily as an editor and is one of the founders of the first editors’ guild in South Africa – says his documentary, A Time to Cull? (April 29 at 8.30pm), is likely to spark another debate entirely. Culling in conservation circles puts a knife between the ribs of many Europeans who feel they can relate better to wildlife than to people from South Africa.
The film may seem curiously out of place as the other documentaries in the Visions series reflect rather more directly on the human consequences of apartheid. But as Thorpe says, the series’s genuine attempt to present a different view on South Africa necessarily includes conservation – also as a land and human rights issue. Wildlife film-making is the first reference point for Africa for many Europeans, and this film seeks to broaden the predictable picture with spectacular images of animals in their own habitat contrasted with the intervention of humans.
Msizi Kuhlane’s Buppies (April 27 at 8.30pm), a documentary that negotiates a short break from the film-maker’s celebrated work for Mail & Guardian Television, is probably the least comfortable of the six films as it takes on its subject of the new black middle class using three case-studies. Buppies had a good response from European critics when South African Visions was first aired on Discovery Europe, but it’s likely South African viewers will like it less.
Kuhlane’s Try Freedom – a knuckle-dusting documentary about apartheid rugby – and the award-winning Ghetto Diaries reflect a capacity for exceptional work which is not necessarily evident in Buppies. Perhaps different subject- matter would have better informed Discovery Europe as to Kuhlane’s talent – a notion which again points to the need for more broadcasting opportunities for our own film-makers to produce work that is also meaningful to them.
South African Visions will be aired on SABC3 from June 9
Goldblatt says the strength of Blood and Guts lies in its “exposing levels of conflict in rugby, reflecting two very different worlds where black and white people play together, but there is a lot of discomfort, a lot of history”.