Aids Day airing for Steps

When Iikka Vehkalahti and Don Edkins took to the main stage at the Baxter Theatre Centre in Cape Town to compere the last of eight screening sessions of about two hours about a month ago, one could not help but feel a palpable sense of satisfaction on their part.

They were satisfied, possibly astonished, that a dream born 18 months ago had come to life in the most colourful and uplifting manner possible.

The occasion was the launch of the Steps for the Future documentary series, which has been described as ”a provocative, challenging and unconventional collection of films about life in Southern Africa in the presence of HIV/Aids”.

The project, Vehkalahti’s brainchild, was conceived last March. Vehkalahti is senior commissioning editor of documentaries for the Finnish Broadcasting Company. It married two simple but very powerful ideas: Vehkalathi’s knowledge of the potential of the regional filmmakers and the need to tell stories about the biggest challenge facing the region.

In doing this they ensured that ”the films are not about despair, depression and dying”.

He then got in touch with Edkins, a Cape Town producer, to set up the Social Transformation and Empowerment Project (Step), a network of filmmakers, commissioning editors and organisations in 20 countries. After raising R20-million, they commissioned about 40 films.

The result is a series of films that are dignity-restoring to those people infected with HIV, and perspective-altering to those affected by it. Drawing inspiration from Robert Begnigni’s movie Life is Beautiful, the films have been subtitled Actually, Life is a Beautiful Thing.

Although sub-Saharan Africa is the region worst affected by Aids, it is important to remember that things need not be that way and that Aids remains a global problem. Thus French director Phillip Brooks’s film 6 000 a Day provides a very important context for most of the work presented in Steps. Its title refers to the number of people infected with the disease.

The film shows how Aids is a disaster that should not have happened. ”I wanted to use Aids as a metaphor for the way the world works,” says the Australian-born filmmaker whose cartoon character voice narrates the film.

6 000 a Day chronicles the brief history of the virus from the time it was discovered in the San Francisco gay community in the early 1980s to the successful development of anti-retroviral medicine. In the 20 years between, the world missed a number of crucial opportunities to contain its spread.

The initial reaction to the virus was one of panic and hysteria. After a period of consolidated action from the mid- to late 1980s, the world slumbered in relative inaction between 1990 and 1995. The complacency was induced, in part, by a 1990 CIA report that projected that by the year 2000, 60% of Aids cases would be in sub-Saharan Africa. Africa now has 70% of the world’s HIV-positive adults and 80% of all infected children.

Brooks says that the Aids problem, and that of poverty in general, can be solved only when you link ”the fears of the rich with the needs of the poor. You can’t keep blaming the [affluent]. There are differing degrees of responsibility from drug companies to the infected individual.”

Sub-Saharan Africa has been a fertile ground for the spread of Aids because of continual displacement from conflict in Central Africa and the migrant labour system at the tip of the continent. The region is the setting for a rich tapestry of films, which skillfully subvert without ignoring the macabre reality of full-blown Aids.

From Zambia comes Imiti Ikula, which tells the story of Memory, a Lusaka streetkid who is among 75 000 in her country orphaned by Aids. She is a multiple rape survivor who still finds time to work and save enough money to buy luxuries like eclipse-viewing glasses.

An outstanding director in the series is Mozambique’s Orlando Mesquita, who provided the hilarious The Ball and Eclipse, a story of four Aids orphans who live by themselves and are watched by the community.

Icons featured in the series that occupy the front line in the battle against Aids include activists Zachie Achmat and the late Simon Nkoli.

Achmat is the subject of Brian Tilley’s It’s My Life, which documents his struggle as chairperson of the Treatment Action Campaign. His life, he says, has been divided into two struggles. The first against apartheid and now the fight for the provision of anti-retroviral medicine in public hospitals. He has placed his own life at risk by refusing to take anti-retrovirals until they are made available to the masses. The film traces his discovery of his homosexuality with slick flashbacks. This theme, however, is not followed through.

In Simon and I, filmmaker Beverly Ditsie weaves her life in the struggle for gay and lesbian rights with that of Nkoli, the gay rights and Aids activist who died in 1999. From

the time they met in 1990 at the formation of the Gay and Lesbian Organisation of Witwatersrand, their destiny was intertwined.

Their relationship was strained around Ditsie’s invitation to the United Nations Conference on the Status of Women in Beijing in 1995. The rift was healed a few years before Nkoli died at age 42.

Ditsie pays fitting tribute by ending the film at the unveiling of a plaque at Simon Nkoli Square in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, at last year’s Gay Pride march — an initiative Nkoli could not live to see reach its 10th birthday.

The face of Aids is overwhelmingly black and female. Even for a region dominated by Africans, it would be interesting to know how the white farmers in Zimbabwe or the Muslim community in Cape Town deal with the pandemic.

It is enlightening to watch Melody Emmett’s Body and Soul examine various religious bodies’ attitudes towards Aids. She encounters Fagmieda Miller who opted to go public with her status. The Muslim Judicial Council not only opposed this but had factions who believed Miller should be stoned to death.

A light-hearted examination of the funeral parlour business, which has mushroomed as the epidemic grips communities, comes from Kgomotso Matsunyane’s Heavy Traffic, which follows a week in the lives of three undertakers.

Yet another great achievement for this project has been its chronicling of the lives of ordinary people living with Aids. Some were part of a contigent of 120 that travelled by train to Cape Town. They smoke and drink, have quirky opinions on relationships and maintain that they ”enjoy sex — with a condom of course”.

They contracted the virus through gang rape, blood transfusion and in steady relationships. All have overcome rejection and use their status to educate their peers and communities about the disease.

As one of the films correctly states, ”A luta continua.”