A motivational essay by Sharon Farr gives the filmmaker’s reasons for making a documentary about Bram Fischer. Here is an extract.
I decided that I needed to make the documentary Love, Communism, Revolution & Rivonia:  Bram Fischer’s Story when, towards the end of 2004, the debate was raging about whether Stellenbosch University should award Bram an honorary doctorate.
Every day the newspapers carried letters and editorials about it. Mostly they centred on the merits or criticisms of communism and the morality of armed struggle, with an underlying debate about Afrikaner identity and what Stellenbosch University’s award would say about it and how it would influence the transformation of that identity.
These are important issues and, of course, Bram Fischer is the perfect person to spark such debate. He was, first and foremost, an Afrikaner. This defined him, it drove him and made him who he was — it was at the heart of his courage and his commitment to the people of South Africa, and to the communist principles that guided his politics and his life. (And that goes for his wife, Molly, as well.)
What bothered me about the honorary doctorate debate was that, while some of the hot-heads who wrote to the newspapers may have known who Bram Fischer was, it seemed that most people in South Africa had barely even heard of him. And an honorary doctorate is given to a particular person for their contribution to making their country, and ultimately the world, a better place. It is not awarded to an ideology, a political theory or political movement.
Because of the debate around the awarding of a doctorate, Bram’s name sparked memories — most knew he’d done something dramatic and important, yet they didn’t know that he was ultimately the one responsible for preventing Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki and the other Rivonia trialists from being hanged, and they didn’t know that he had led the Communist Party underground. And that, instead of going into exile, he’d chosen to stay, taking a solitary defiant stand, living in disguise, and so became South Africa’s most wanted person, finally spending the last nine years of his life in jail, sentenced to life imprisonment on much the same charges as Mandela and the others.
Bram Fischer’s Story was to be the first comprehensive documentary on his life, and I felt his life needed to be contextualised in the history of the South African struggle — that this needed to be the spine of the film. But I also wanted it to be extremely personal — to show him as a real person, not just a political figure, and that this should be the body and soul of the film.
I had phenomenal access to information, to footage and photographs thanks to Bram’s daughters, Ruth Rice and Ilse Wilson. Ruth is my mother-in-law. So, we’d be sitting having lunch on a Sunday and somebody would remember something they thought might be relevant and we’d have a quick discussion about it between mouthfuls. Obviously, I had several formal research meetings at different stages, but this ongoing access to their thoughts and their memories was really helpful. In fact, it was during a Sunday lunch that I became aware of the existence of the 8mm footage Bram had taken of the family from 1942 to 1960 — what a Godsend for a film with such limited visual potential! Aside from a few shots of Bram during the Rivonia Trial, and a few from when he was released on bail in 1964 to represent a client at the Privy Council in London, there were no visuals other than photographs and newspaper clippings.
What I really loved about the 8mm footage was that it gave Bram’s wife, Molly, and their son, Paul, a really strong presence in the documentary, and this would have been really difficult to achieve merely with photographs — and I have Bram to thank for that.
There are so many different approaches and styles we can use to tell a story, yet from the beginning I felt that I must use a classical documentary style because, as radical as Bram was politically, he was still a man of his time. Born in 1908, his time was from the1920s to the 1960s and, given what I knew about his personality and his approach to his work, his family and the struggle, I didn’t feel there was a place for quick cuts, cinéma vérité or funky effects. Instead, I wanted to deliver a fairly chronological, easy-to-follow story that would provide a touch of a history lesson but that would also grip the viewer with its human drama, emotion, honesty and courage.