At the premiere of his documentary about his father and family, Born into Struggle, Rehad Desai singled me out as a movie critic doing some good for the South African movie industry. Now that is a charge I would like formally to deny, if only on principle. At least I didn’t hate Born into Struggle, though. That would have been a bit embarrassing.
Born into Struggle shows the repercussions of resistance to apartheid on one struggle family. Such accounts provide a sort of sidelong view of the struggle, which is refreshing -— and touching in a simple, human, intimate way. Such stories are often best told in a small, personal voice, and documentary is a more suitable medium than feature film, which seems generically inclined to magnify what should be diminished and vice versa.
The tale told by Born into Struggle is simple enough. Activist Barney Desai left South Africa in the 1960s, in a hurry, and his family followed soon after. They set themselves up in London, where Desai became a distinguished lawyer. But Desai was a leader in the Pan Africanist Congress, not the African National Congress, which seems to have isolated him and his family from the networks of support available to ANC and South African Communist Party members in exile. The PAC was definitely the poor relation. Rehad Desai doesn’t quite say so in Born into Struggle, but it seems, too, that Barney Desai’s Indian ethnicity may have made him a bit of an odd-man-out in the PAC.
The Desai family members speak candidly and movingly about how they dealt with this situation and what flowed from it, such as dad’s disillusionment and consequent heavy drinking. Child abuse and drugs are part of this larger picture but, despite the traumas recounted, there is a strong strain of good humour here too. It makes a riveting documentary.
Watching Born into Struggle on DVD projection in a big cinema, though, does make one wonder whether it wouldn’t be best seen on TV. (It will get there, but it seems that a cinema release provides good publicity.) I felt the same about Amandla! and Sophiatown. Until DVD projection can equal film in visual quality, which I have yet to see, my viewpoint would be: if it wasn’t shot on film, it shouldn’t be in a cinema. (Most projectionists can’t seem to keep an ordinary film in focus at the best of times anyway.) It’s a strain watching blurry video or DVD footage blown up so big. Why this yearning for the grandiosity of the cinema screen? The intimate tone of Born into Struggle is perfectly suited to TV. I have to admit, though, that if I had red eyes when I emerged from the screening, it wasn’t entirely the fault of the projection.