There is a scene in the Brazilian film What Is it Worth? that is almost worthy of Luis Buñuel. A rich do-gooder has hauled a bunch of drug-addicted street people to a refuge in the countryside, where a spiritual type in a white smock gets them to drink some herbal concoction designed to purify their systems.
Next thing they’re all vomiting green bile, to the encouraging exhortations of the guru guy — and while Mrs Do-Gooder trains her video camera on them. When one of the hurling derelicts, a young woman, tries in her shame to turn away, Mrs Do-Gooder tells her not to — that it’s necessary to get this on video as a record of this highly worthy charity project.
In such a scene, it feels like What Is It Worth? is going for full-on satire, playing the delusional antics of rich philanthropists for their potential as black humour. And yet, in other parts of the movie, it seems to want to be taken seriously in the way a documentary exposing abuse and chicanery would have to be taken seriously.
What Is It Worth? mixes it up right across the board. Showing at the Tri-Continental Film Festival, which opened this week at Cinema Nouveau in Johannesburg and Cape Town, it fits into that festival’s activist agenda, but it is a feature film and not a documentary, hitherto the staple content of the festival. What Is It Worth? engages very strongly with social issues and goes for a sense of dramatised documentary rather than outright fictionality.
This generic mix is what makes What Is It Worth? so interesting, but also makes it somewhat problematic. The movie focuses on the charity industry in Brazil, drawing parallels with the institutions of slavery a century or two ago and highlighting the way that charitable organisations are in themselves a money-making system that, it seems, exploits the poorest of the poor as much as any heartless capitalist corporation does.
The film points out that if all the money spent on a project to document street children were simply given to them, they could each get an apartment and pay for a decent education. It shows, in a fictionalised stream, the money-grabbing and manipulation of those who run charities and generate their fundraising ads. A scene with a filmmaker trying to sort a bunch of underprivileged children by shades of skin colour, so that the approved quota of racial types can be reflected in the relevant film, will strike a chord with many a South African.
In fact, What Is It Worth? poses a lot of provocative questions for us (part of the “global South” as we are) and its form makes it more provocative still. It has voice-overs reading from state archives and some sections seem to be direct depictions of real people involved in the charity industry, but one is not sure where the line falls between documentary realism and fictional invention. The problem here is that documentary and fiction produce different kinds of truth and, when the forms are jammed together like this, one begins to question both apparent truths.
The scene described at the start of this review would be an example. Is it based on a real event, as other parts of the film clearly are? Or is it being exaggerated for rhetorical reasons? If it is, what about the other claims made in the film? There is obviously a serious issue to do with poverty and charity being exposed here, but to what degree is the audience being manipulated?
The preview DVD I saw came to a grinding halt about half an hour before the end, so I’m not sure what, if any, solutions the film proposes to the problems it depicts. There seemed to be a kidnapping being planned, but I don’t know how that plays out. And I don’t know what purpose is served by fictional solutions to real problems except to make the audience feel better.
At any rate, and how ever it concludes, What Is It Worth? is an extremely interesting piece of work. It’s worth seeing not just for the issues it deals with but because it’s the kind of movie we seldom see in our cinemas: it has a driving social conscience, it’s about societies and institutions rather than individuals as such; it engages with the real world, and its moral issues are complex in a way that is very far from the schematic knee-jerk stuff of the mainstream.