Sharp-eyed readers (which of course includes all of you out there) will not have failed to notice that I did not finish a thought that I began in last week’s column–namely, what the films in the Three Continents Documentary Film Festival held at Buenos Aires, Argentina, were all about. I simply ran out of space, having wandered into the daunting issue
of human rights in Argentina.
This week I hope to make good on at least some of those omissions.
It has probably not been suitably celebrated here at home that the first prize in this film festival went to a South African documentary film –Ingrid Gavshon’s Facing Death … Facing Life, which deals with the harrowing ordeal of the Sharpeville Six.
The Sharpeville Six, if you recall, was a group of ordinary township people who were randomly picked out, after the fact, from the crowd who in 1984 had lynched a black representative of apartheid authority in the township of Sharpeville (a name made famous for an apartheid massacre in the early 1960s, as you will recall) and were sentenced to be judicially executed for the crime of “common purpose” in this lethal act.
The idea was that their judicial execution should serve as “an example” against the idea of “people’s power” in the dying years of minority white rule — and this was exactly at the time when “people’s power”, namely the advent of a long-awaited democratic dispensation, was unavoidably on the cards.
Gavshon’s film uses a combination of archive footage of the build-up to the murderous event, as well as interviews with the victims of this travesty of justice, through their harrowing months on death row, right up to their 11th-hour reprieve, to powerful effect. She also intersperses dramatic reconstructions of parts of their ordeal and details the painful process of their inevitably difficult and incomplete rehabilitation into a rapidly changing South Africa.
Gavshon’s film is a portrait of our times, if you care to read it like that. It has been given one showing on one of our national channels, and that’s it. It would seem that another reflection of our times is that important issues raised in strong documentary films are not given sufficient airing and time for debate in our brave new society. But that’s another story.
What was striking, in viewing other films in the Three Continents festival, is how potently the times in which we live are being portrayed from so many marginalised parts of the world.
The festival is a relatively new initiative, focusing on pressing issues on the three continents in question — the Americas, Africa and Asia.
Surprisingly, only four films represented the African continent — and these were all from South Africa, with Aids being the dominating theme in two of these. No doubt the continent will be better represented in future years as the festival organisers widen their contact base and the festival itself becomes better known to filmmakers across the world.
Asia was represented by a number of powerful films from India and Bangladesh, and an astonishing piece from Cambodia, running at almost two hours, that gave a riveting account of one family’s struggle for survival in the cruel aftermath of several recent wars and genocides.
Given the human-rights theme of the festival, it is not surprising that the Americas were almost exclusively represented by stories from Central and South America. There was, for example, a very witty examination of the legacy of Mexican revolutionary Emilio Zapata, offset with flashes of the country’s youth rap culture, posing the question: is Zapata, a hero who lives only in the fading memories of a dying generation, still relevant in today’s world?
There was also a moving tale of an all but forgotten community of black people in Costa Rica whose dreams of returning to their African ancestral homeland were dashed when the ocean liners of Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line failed to materialise, way back in the 1930s — although many old folks still swear that they saw the ships approaching the coastline. Getting on board them was another matter — and so the former slaves were to be stuck forever in the New World.
If North America did not feature directly, it was hard to ignore the role American politics has played in the shaping of all these histories. As a new American president rattles his sabres once more in anticipation of a new assault on far-off Iraq, the film Memories of a Forgotten War rings ominous bells. It recalls another American president’s decision to command a United States invasion of the distant Philippines in 1899 — an invasion justified for no other reason than that the pattern of islands that make up the Philippines was of strategic importance to America’s economic and military interests.
As the film recounts, the Filipinos put up a remarkable fight against an invader armed with far superior weaponry. For their insolence, something in the order of a million Filipinos were killed in the course of this lengthy military campaign.
The world has changed in many ways since the stories recounted in these films were unfolding. But in many ways it has not. Injustice at inconceivable levels still stalks our human environment across the globe.
What is critical is that there are writers, storytellers and filmmakers who, somehow or other, still manage to highlight the human dramas that unfold in the background of the world’s grand political events. An event like the Three Continents festival somehow brings us closer together through the sharing of these sagas of life and death.
John Matshikiza was hosted by the South African embassy in Buenos Aires as an official adjudicator for the Three Continents International Documentary Film Festival
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