The 45th Durban Film Festival fittingly kicks off this year on Nelson Mandela Intl. Day, a worldwide celebration of South Africa’s first Black president, whose tireless efforts to bring an end to apartheid led to the country’s first democratic elections 30 years ago.
Three decades after the historic victory of Mandela’s African National Congress party, South Africans are wrestling with the progress and setbacks since their nation’s audacious transition to majority rule. Though the country has certainly taken bold strides in its efforts to redress the inequities of the apartheid era, looming challenges remain. Crime is rampant, as is corruption. Unemployment is high, particularly among an increasingly disgruntled generation born and raised in the democratic era. That the ANC has failed to deliver on many of its promises became stingingly obvious in elections earlier this year, when the party failed to win a majority of the vote for the first time since it came to power.
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For many South Africans, the 30th anniversary of democracy has prompted a moment for soul-searching. “South Africa is the most unequal country in the world,” says Tara Moore, whose sweeping documentary “Legacy: The De-Colonized History of South Africa,” opens this year’s festival. “The question is, why does it remain that unequal if we have democracy? Why does that inequality persist if in ’94, by law, everything is supposedly equal?”
Moore’s documentary is a painstakingly researched examination of the brutal policies of the colonial and apartheid eras, which disenfranchised more than 80% of the South African population. It shows how legislation such as the 1913 Natives Land Act, which prohibited Black South Africans from owning land, and other measures introduced under apartheid, laid the groundwork for today’s staggering inequality by denying them the ability to accrue the kind of generational wealth that could have pulled the largely underprivileged Black community out of poverty. While the ruling ANC party has certainly failed to rise to the challenge and right many of those wrongs, says Moore, “apartheid got us in the hole in the first place.”
Diana Keam’s “Don’t Be Late for My Funeral” offers a more intimate, personal exploration of the apartheid era through the story of the filmmaker’s domestic worker and nanny, Margaret Bogopa Matlala, who Keam credits with providing her with emotional stability and support throughout her turbulent childhood. The film follows the director’s journey to Margaret’s rural town to celebrate her 80th birthday, an event that brings together two families spanning generational and racial divides in the “new” South Africa.
“It felt important to lean into the uncomfortable conversations and to show how much my family benefited from her strong presence while her own children grew up miles away,” says the director. “[It’s] vital for us to make sense of our past and build a constructive future together. If we don’t face ourselves and our pain, how can we move forward?“
Keam’s film is a tribute to her former nanny and a testament to the outsized impact she had on the lives around her; but “Don’t Be Late for My Funeral” is a reminder, too, that many South Africans’ lived experiences straddle the 1994 divide. For all the hopefulness around the birth of the post-apartheid “Rainbow Nation,” South Africa’s first democratic elections were hardly a clean break from the past.
Both Naledi Bogacwi’s “Banned,” about the outlawed apartheid-era action film “Joe Bullet,” and writer-director Craig Tanner’s festival closing film “The Showerhead,” about the firebrand political cartoonist Zapiro, showcase how the fight for individual freedoms hasn’t stopped under majority rule. Bogacwi’s documentary explores how the campaign against “Joe Bullet” — the first South African feature film with an all-Black cast — and the wider censorship efforts of the apartheid government were “not only about suppressing political dissent but also about silencing the everyday lives and aspirations of Black people,” the director says.
The apartheid government cast a wide net when it came to its draconian censorship laws; as a student activist, “Showerhead” director Tanner saw his own work banned by the white nationalist regime because it ran contrary to their party line. His film follows the career of the trailblazing political cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro, whose trenchant satirical comedy put him in the crosshairs of former president Jacob Zuma and the powerful legal apparatus of the state. With freedom of expression under siege in South Africa, says Tanner, “it takes a special kind of courage, fortitude and endurance, as exemplified by Zapiro, to continue to speak truth to power.”
Thanks to one of the world’s most progressive constitutions, South Africans of all colors and creeds certainly enjoy freedoms they lacked during the apartheid era, while on-screen representation of Blacks has grown by leaps and bounds since the days before democratic rule; under apartheid, Bogacwi notes, “any portrayal of Black people living harmoniously, prosperously, or even just driving cars and living peacefully in places like Soweto contradicted [government] propaganda and was suppressed.”
Ironically, though, the carefree depictions of everyday life that were banned under apartheid are still in scant supply among this year’s crop of South African feature films in Durban, stressing how a country still riven by inequality and facing an uncertain economic and political future has, for many, reached a tipping point.
Attend a dinner party in South Africa and the talk will eventually turn to a break-in or carjacking or one of the countless lurid spectacles splashed across the frothy front pages of the local tabloids. The same criminals terrorizing local communities are also running rampant in its cinemas, with nefarious acts in all shapes and sizes forming a common throughline across the Durban selection.
Ambitious in scope, Mark Engels’ “Masinga: The Calling” pits its titular hero — an African-born, U.K.-based Interpol inspector — against a shadowy international cabal when he’s sent to Southern Africa to repatriate a group of Ukrainian teenagers trafficked by a figure from the Russian underworld. The geopolitical stakes get ratcheted up, but Engels nevertheless keeps the story rooted in his native KwaZulu-Natal, with its dramatic landscapes, indigenous beliefs and rogues’ gallery of “powerful and often corrupt characters who live here.”
Kidnapping is also the focal point of multi-hyphenate Terrence Aphane’s “Sonti,” in which a village teen saves the life of a woman who’s been taken hostage, only to put his family — and his own life — at risk. In “Sierra’s Gold,” meanwhile, from veteran director Adze Ugah, a Black artist in Johannesburg with a decidedly off-kilter natural gift finds herself mixed up with the wrong crowd when a pawn shop owner and his henchmen invade her home with designs on her unexpected windfall. While the directors take radically different approaches to their movies, the prevailing threat of violence feels as familiar to the characters on screen as it would to audiences watching in villages, townships or gated suburbs across South Africa.
Ugah, who was born in Nigeria, moved to the country in 2005 to attend AFDA, one of the continent’s leading film schools, and he quickly found a home in the booming post-apartheid South African industry. “The eyes of the world were on it for what it could do in the filmic space,” he says. The director’s career in the years since has made that decision bear fruit — his credits include the hit romcom “Mrs. Right Guy” and the Netflix original film “Jewel” — proving that for all its troubles, South Africa remains a lode star for filmmakers from across the continent.
Aphane, meanwhile, grew up poor in the remote village of Ga-Molapo in Limpopo province, where “the only time I forgot we had nothing was when I watched a movie,” he says. This marks the second feature for the director, who built a following in film school with his YouTube channel Small House Brainiacs, where he launched his no-budget debut, “Noon to Sunrise.” It’s roughly 600 miles from Ga-Molapo to Durban — about the same distance as a round-trip drive from Hollywood to Modesto — but Aphane’s journey from the village to the big screen would have been unthinkable in the days before democratic rule.
“If you haven’t been to South Africa, you haven’t seen the world,” insists Lesego, the narrator of Kagiso Sam Leburu’s breezy township comedy “Month End.” While the hardscrabble life of South Africa’s impoverished urban settlements has gotten the big screen treatment before — think Gavin Hood’s Academy Award winner “Tsotsi” or Jahmil X.T. Qubeka’s gritty Toronto player “Knuckle City” — Leburu’s bright, boisterous film sets out to “make sure that township stories are told with the most colorful backdrop, to make sure that the world sees our townships as vibrant as they are,” according to the director.
Set against the backdrop of youth unemployment and rampant criminality, “Month End” follows Lesego, a young slacker, and her best friend, Boom Shaka, as they try to elude the clutches of a ruthless loan shark called Dollar. If the stakes don’t seem especially high — it’s not a life, but a flat-screen TV, that’s on the line if the girls don’t pay up — that suits the tone of Leburu’s winning comedy all the same. “A typical day in the township: we get up, look for a job, smoke some weed, then go to bed,” says Lesego. The bleak headlines may suggest that the heady promise of South Africa’s democratic transition remains unfulfilled, if not entirely squandered, but a typical day can still offer its small consolations.
The Durban Film Festival runs July 18 – 28.
