Janet Smith
Since Ordinary People revolutionised the South African TV documentary in the early 1990s – and, indeed, the way the SABC’s current-affairs producers approached their subject after that – Mail & Guardian Television has set a standard for all other independent film-makers to follow.
Its most innovative work to date, the award-winning Ghetto Diaries, was admired for its bravery which took the commitment to putting real South Africans on the small screen further than any other television show had done. People who had never held a video camera before were taught how to use the equipment to tell stories about their own lives in the series screened on SABC1 last year. What emerged were mostly interior pieces which may have showed a relatively crude technical ability but which revealed stories film-makers can rarely tell.
Confident, uninhibited, unfettered by notions of proper behaviour and saying the right thing to make a good impression, Ghetto Diaries broke the mould. Now Mail & Guardian Television has a new Ghetto Diaries series on air, running for nine weeks in SABC1’s impressive Take Five youth magazine – a project developed for the Learn’n’Live service – at 4.45pm on Mondays. Supervised by award-winning producer Dingan T Kapa, who was series director on the last Ghetto Diaries, Diaries on Five is probably the most honest series for teenagers yet made in South Africa in that it uses young people to tell their stories their own way to their peers.
Again, like the first Ghetto Diaries, the novice directors were trained by Kapa, and then given carte blanche on filming their lives. With creative intervention from exceptional editor Ronelle Loots, Diaries on Five emerges as a fascinating index of young South Africans facing private and universal difficulties.
Naturally, the teenage directors have the advantage of being entirely TV-literate, most of them having grown up with television and understanding its codes and standards for presentation. This advantage obviously offered them a range of television styles from which to choose – and most use their cameras with a certain affinity for the medium.
Extending the Learn’n’Live brief of integrating curriculum material into programming, Diaries on Five hinges on issues around discrimination and the development of a positive self-image. This is life-skills training at its most sophisticated, and it’s a collection that also shows a lot of promise among its novice directors.
Among the participants is a gay teenager from Kwa-Thema who discusses attitudes towards his honesty regarding his sexuality. There’s Charity, who has spent most of her life in the United States and is regarded, to her disappointment, as an immigrant by some of her peers. Lebo and Tembi are trainee traditional doctors in Sekhukuneland. Ventersdorp teenager Fabian tackles integration in schools.
Instead of simply telling her story with a dispassionate sense of order and intent, Rinaka, an Eldorado Park teenager with epilepsy, uses images of the beauty of her body in a swimming pool to remind us that she is whole and strong and able. It carries a symbolism she may not have intended, but a powerful symbolism nonetheless.
Meshak, a disabled 15-year-old from Dobsonville, has crafted a remarkable piece of work with a magic arm fitted to his wheelchair to enable him to make a film about how disabled people are perceived by his community.