Matthew Krouse
The Encounters Swiss South African Documentary Film Festival is the first of its kind in South Africa. Given our proud history of documentary film-making it’s surprising that no others have preceded this major event that launched on June 20.
An initiative of the film department of the Swiss cultural organisation Pro Helvetia and the Cape production house Big World Cinema, Encounters is showing 24 documentaries, the majority South African works produced in the last two years.
In the programme of the event, directors Nodi Murphy and Steven Markovitz have noted that although documentaries are generally associated with being viewed on television, the Encounters festival “allows these films to be screened in all their glory on the big screen, giving them the status they deserve”.
With this festival, the great progressive South African documentary tradition finally gets its due. And with this comes due recognition of the new generation of documentary makers who have gathered in Cape Town to show their latest works. As Murphy and Markovitz point out, locals like Clifford Bestall, Liz Fish, Harriet Gavshon and Zola Maseko are all achieving international acclaim in their careers.
A special section of the programme includes four quaint South African documentaries made in the Fifties and Sixties that show how the apartheid mythology was constructed in film.
The concept was initiated in 1998 by Markovitz when he was invited to Locarno, Europe’s oldest film festival in the Swiss Italian region. There he noticed an interesting synergy between South African and Swiss documentary practice and suggested the Encounters festival idea.
This week three visiting Swiss documentary film-makers will show six films, one of them dating back to 1964. In addition, the visitors – Alexander Seiler, Richard Dindo and Thomas Imbach – will sit on panel discussions that have already begun.
Commenting on these, Markovitz says: “It’s interesting how different the challenges facing Swiss and South African filmmakers are. The Swiss have to search for stories, and their films are far more subtle and nuanced. We have an endless supply of stories staring us in the face, they’re all big issues, but our challenge is how to tell them in interesting ways.”
According to Markovitz, plans are afoot to make the Encounters festival into an annual event