In America you say ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ and everyone says, ‘Oh, Winnie Mandela. I mean isn’t it interesting that Amy Biehl, this American girl, gets killed and suddenly the whole world knows about it and very little else about what happened there,” say Academy Award-nominated film-makers Frances Reid and Deborah Hoffmann.
Their film, Long Night’s Journey Into Day, about the TRC, is now showing at Cape Town’s Labia and Cinema Starz. It will play in Port Elizabeth and Pretoria and Johannesburg later this month. The 95-minute documentary examines four cases brought before the TRC:that of Amy Biehl; the police murders of the Cradock Four activists; the Magoo’s bombing; and that of Thapelo Molefe, a police officer involved in the murders of the Guguletu Seven.
Hoffmann and Reid — in South Africa for the premiére of the film — told me that they didn’t set out to make the definitive film about the TRC. Rather, they intended a piece that focused on individual stories and the moral quandaries and socio-political issues that abounded during the process.
They first heard about the TRC on National Public Radio in San Francisco. ”It was one of those situations where you can’t get out of the car because you have to keep listening to the radio. We were aghast at all the gory details,” Hoffmann says. ”It just blew my mind that, first of all, a whole country would uncover its past, as opposed to avoiding it, and then would discuss it on a national level. I think for me in particular, as a person who does hold grudges and doesn’t forgive people, I found it a very challenging idea.
”The next day over breakfast I read a piece about it in the New York Times and I foolishly said to Frances, ‘I hope somebody is making a film about this.’ There was this terrible silence and I saw her face. Oh God! Obviously, she was thinking ‘Why not us?” ”There have been a lot of truth commissions around the world in relation to human rights abuses,” says Reid. ”But I think this is the first time there has been a real commitment to the truth. A lot of the other ones have been doing a blanket amnesty where there really is no individual accountability.
”That’s why South Africa excited us. Look at the Nuremberg trials, where you had Nazi after Nazi coming up and not accepting any responsibility or blame for what they did. In South Africa you have people coming up and admitting to doing terrible things. I think it’s something that could be applied to so many situations around the world. Look at America and slavery and the civil rights movement — we could really use South Africa as a role model.”
The film-makers have encountered some flak being foreigners coming to South Africa to ”exploit” our stories, but they are quick and unapologetic in defending their stand.
Says Hoffmann: ”I think initially we questioned ourselves. Do we have the right to do this? Is this really okay? Are we exploiting the situation for our own needs? And then, we realised that as objective outsiders we were probably better equipped to do this than anybody else. All the local people who were covering this were, literally, having nervous breakdowns. It took a huge emotional toll on everybody but luckily we had the luxury of coming home to San Francisco and putting a distance between ourselves and it.”
The two have been live-in lovers since meeting on the Oscar-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, about the murdered gay activist, which Reid photographed and Hoffmann edited. ”I think on Long Day’s Journey it really helped that there were the two of us so we could decompress and debrief at the end of the day.
”It is hard, though, making a movie with your life partner, because you have no one to complain to. You can’t say, ‘You won’t believe what the jerk at the office did to me’,” says Hoffmann.
The two made seven visits to the country over a period of three years and shot over 120 hours of footage on Digital Betacam, which was edited down to 94 minutes over two and a half years. The film won the coveted Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, the Peace Film Prize in Berlin, as well as prizes in Jerusalem, Newport Beach, Taos, San Francisco and Munich.
Yet, says Hoffmann, responses to the film have not been uniformly laudatory. ”Some said that the movie just perpetuates the myth that whites are bad and that blacks are good. Another audience strangely said that the film showed that blacks supported apartheid and all whites were in the resistance. The film is as complex as the TRC itself – it’s emotional, but I also hope intellectually challenging.”
TRC commissioner Glenda Wildschut said of Long Days Journey: ”The film gets to the heart, soul and essence of what we were trying to do in the commission. I really thought it was impossible for someone who is not a South African to make the film that they have made and I was wrong.”
Many South Africans are now tired of the TRC process; there has been a surfeit of television coverage of the proceedings. Attendance in Cape Town over the past two weeks has been good, but Ludi Boeken, manager of the Labia Theatre, notes that most of the admissions have been foreigners.
Unlike many journalists and filmmakers who come to South Africa, do their thing here and then leave with it, Hoffmann and Reid have brought their film back here – and the irony is that, unlike many struggling South African film-makers, have secured a local theatrical release.
