A world without documentaries, as Ally Derks, director of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (Idfa), observed at the awards ceremony at the end of November, would be a world “with less thought, less reflection and less dialogue”.
It’s a truism especially valid as the mainstream media industry struggles to find the resources to fund investigative journalism.
At Idfa, the biggest documentary film festival in the world, filmmakers delved into issues ranging from the Zionist construction of mythology to legitimise oppression (Eyal Sivan’s Jaffa, the Orange’s Clockwork) to an X-Ray of the political lurch to the left in South America (Gonzalo Arijon’s Eyes Wide Open) and Omar Majid’s rockumentary, Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam.
Many films interrogated preconceived notions of our world and raised awareness about the commonality inherent in ordinary humanity.
The class divide will certainly prevent street traders from Durban, who are battling the imposition of a mall in Warwick Triangle, from ever watching Francisco Hervé’s uplifting The Power of Speech. Thus, they may never realise how similar their struggle is to that of Hardy Vallejos and other hawkers in Santiago, Chile.
Yet the possibility of a connected humanity remains because these stories are being told. And although the filmmaking process is being democratised through cheaper technology and the internet, the selection of stories to be screened at festivals, and who tells these stories, retains a bias towards Europe and North America.
At Idfa — the international industry benchmark — filmmakers from the United States, England, the Netherlands, France, Germany and Canada provided more than 70% of the programme of 304 films.
Student film category jurists, Jonathan Stack and Yulene Olaizola (both directors) “questioned” why all films selected in that competition where made by Northern Europeans. They further noted the “safe choice of topics” by student filmmakers: “Not every film has to have a big topic. Yet one can’t help wondering why a host of young people are distancing themselves from their world,” said Stack.
In the majority of instances, when the camera concentrated on Africa, Asia or South America, the lens was from the global North.
In South Africa, too, local filmmakers have to function on smaller budgets than their northern counterparts, being constrained by dependency, largely, on government funding through state broadcasters.
Many countries in the South either do not channel adequate public funds in this direction or frivolous spending debilitates their state broadcasters. Government-imposed notions of what sort of films should be made also hampers creativity.
South African filmmaker Rehad Desai (Born into Struggle, Dilemma), who attended Idfa, said that the problem of “distance” was created when foreign filmmakers don’t spend enough time “developing an intimate knowledge of the people and the story. That is not to say it doesn’t happen with local filmmakers — after all, there is a class divide [in South Africa].”
Singling out the Oscar-nominated Mugabe and the White Farmer, a film by British filmmakers Andrew Thompson and Lucy Bailey, which had its European premiere at Idfa, Desai noted that there appeared to be “no interrogation of [the filmmakers’] own assumptions about land. There was no understanding of land stewardship within the African context. There was an unproblematised view of white farmers — the way it’s shot we see black people in the film only as a faceless, threatening militia.”
Dutch filmmaker Saskia Vredeveld, whose White Poverty — In the New South Africa premiered at Idfa, sees nothing wrong with the West turning to places such as Africa for stories “because there is so much drama and conflict in the South”.
Having been born and having spent her first 15 years in South Africa, Vredeveld, who has made several films about the country, including Self Portrait, Roger Ballen and Homesick of SA, dismisses any notion of a fetishisation of the country and its issues because “my heart lies there”.
But her latest film, a well-meaning look at the increasing number of poor whites in the country, suffers from a lack of nuance. Although focusing on their increasing marginalisation in the new dispensation, Vredeveld’s film lacks the historical context of apartheid’s protected employment for whites, regardless of IQ or talent, in state parastatals and municipalities. There is no thorough investigation of the socio-political imperatives towards transformation from 1994 onwards.
Yet, in conversation with the Mail & Guardian, Vredeveld, who is well versed in South African history and politics, and who will soon begin shooting a film about black economic empowerment, said this framing was excluded because it was impossible to squeeze everything in. A tragedy, because the film can be regarded as reactionary, especially by South African audiences.
Demanding that the South tell its own stories may be tantamount to prescription, but to avert the neo-colonial gaze and open up proper discourse, reflection and understanding of ourselves, it is essential — especially in a teenage democracy such as South Africa, which has so many stories to tell.
Idfa has launched an online free-to-watch documentary library that is set to have about 200 films by the end of 2010. Visit www.idfa.nl to view the 36 films currently on its database