Friends and colleagues of former Mail & Guardian chief photographer Kevin Carter, who committed suicide in 1994, were overjoyed this week that a low-budget documentary about his life has been nominated for an Oscar.
The Death of Kevin Carter: Casualty of the Bang Bang Club, a 27-minute documentary directed by photojournalist Dan Krauss, garnered a nomination for best short documentary.
Other nominations with a South African connection are Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi, nominated for best foreign film, and Charlize Theron, nominated for best actress.
The Death of Kevin Carter is a United States-funded student production which earned Krauss an honourable mention at the University of California’s graduate school of journalism.
Carter’s closest associates — photographers Joao Silva and Greg Marinovich — do not appear in it. They co-wrote the 2000 best-seller The Bang Bang Club, which chronicled the exploits of a group of South African photographers in the war-torn townships in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
According to Silva, he and Marinovich could not contribute to the documentary because “we are contractually bound on a film being made about The Bang Bang Club. It was nothing sinister. Krauss did approach me and I gave him photographs.”
Silva said the documentary was “quite riveting. It was a good take on Kevin and it deserves a nomination. Kevin was many things to many people, but it captures a lot of what he was.”
A local publisher and Carter’s former friend and M&G colleague, Reedwaan Vally, who appears in the documentary, described it as a “valid telling. It is very sensitive.”
On Tuesday, Vally received an e-mail from Krauss expressing joy at the nomination.
The film’s main drawcard internationally is that it focuses on the man who took the Pulitzer prize-winning photograph of an emaciated child being stalked by a vulture in the Sudan.
“Obviously the ‘budgie photo’ was the one that sparked everyone’s interest,” Vally said, “besides the fact that the Manic Street Preachers made a song about Kevin.
“That a young American could tap into the mindset of a person like Kevin, his work, his madness, his obsessiveness, and come out here and do a documentary on a shoestring budget should be rewarded with this kind of acknowledgement.”
The Death of Kevin Carter has also won four awards on the US film festival circuit.