The carefully curated programme of documentary films of the 28th Encounters South African International Documentary Festival is intended to bring people together at multiple venues in Cape Town, Joburg and Pretoria from June 4 to 14.
Whether the times we are living in are the craziest ever, or whether the world is just plain crazy and we’re just privileging our own chaotic moment, declarations of hope and love go a long way to sustain our sanity.
Knife: The Attempted Murder Of Salman Rushdie, starts with the famous author’s stabbing on August 12 2022. Award-winning documentary director, Alex Gibney, builds on the intimate and revealing footage of Rushdie filmed by his wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, from immediately after the stabbing. Archival materials, various classic films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water and Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, added to the voiceover from Rushdie’s book Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, contextualises his most pivotal writings within place, time, the global mood and his personal frame of mind, including the Satanic Verses controversy. Rushdie, a man whose greatest weapon is the pen, reflects on the fatwa (death decree) which had been a physical and mental incarceration for him over many years.
Although this memoir is about a traumatic experience, it’s also inspirational. Rushdie refuses to meet hate with hate. Ironically, he was on stage at the Chautauqua Institution, which aspires to a more civil society, to engage in a discussion about freedom of creative expression when a man with apparent blind hatred attacked him with a knife, stabbing him in the face, neck and abdomen, inflicting injuries that permanently damaged his liver, paralysed his hand and blinded his right eye. Instead of focusing on sensationalism, Knife, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, leads us to love, life, hope and humanity.
TUTU similarly focuses on love in hateful times. Directed by Sam Pollard, known for his portraits of black civil rights activists and pop culture figures — and as the editor of many of Spike Lee’s films — TUTU muses on the question: how does one remain non-violent when confronting hate, and how does one retain hope when change takes a very long time to come about? The decades of footage of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, his wife Leah and their extended family, captured by Cape Town journalists Roger Friedman and Benny Gool, are creatively used by Pollard, together with insightful interviews, to capture the essence of the high-energy Tutu: prayer, peace, reconciliation, equality and hope.
While we remember the “Arch” so fondly, the film reminds us of the hatred he faced while continuing to live his message of conciliation. Quite remarkably, the final message that TUTU leaves us is with is one of hope.
Hope still exists for some of our city’s most marginalised people. At Johannesburg’s traffic lights, a hidden economy unfolds as performers and traders transform moments into opportunities for survival. Robots follows Gift “Marshmallows”, a street performer known for his Headless Man act, as he balances public spectacle with the realities of fatherhood, financial pressure and personal struggle, revealing the resilience and humanity behind life on the city’s margins.
Whispers of hope and defiance thread through the recently completed Notes from the Underground, which tells the history of Cape Town’s hip-hop movement, rooted in the Cape Flats. Hip-hop is often synonymous with rap music, but more than that, it’s a culture and a way of being that finds expression through rapping, DJing, breakdancing, graffiti art and in a philosophy of community awareness, self-respect, civil rights, and telling it as it is about the liberation from both the structures of apartheid and neocolonialism.
Notes from the Underground is loosely shaped around the inter-generational relationship between rapper Isaac Mutant and his daughter Lyrix. The rappers, including DJ Ready D, best known as the DJ for Prophets of the City and producer of the group Brasse Vannie Kaap, protest in a variety of tongues: English, Xhosa and ‘Afrikaaps’. Through the spoken word, graffiti, music and dance, the contours of a broader story, of a community shaped by displacement and resistance, are told in a gritty fashion. From Encounters, Notes from the Underground travels to Sheffield DocFest, the UK’s leading documentary festival.
Dr Neil Hudson Aggett was his own principled man, gently but firmly defying his parents and the community that shaped him, to become a disciplined trade union organiser driven by a commitment to improved conditions for workers in South Africa. Aggett, a trained medical doctor, was an enigma to the security police, who systematically tortured him during his 70 days in detention at the former John Vorster Police Station until he was found hanging from a strip of kikoi cloth in his police cell on February 5 1982. An inquest held in February 1982 into the cause of his death found that Aggett had committed suicide and that no-one was to blame for his death, despite the figurative fingerprints of the security police that were in plain sight. The Hour After Midnight is constructed around the spine of the re-opened inquest in the 2020s after new evidence became available. We witness the wheels of justice turning slowly, and when the inquest judge finally rules that Aggett had been killed by members of the security police, we can’t help wondering whether justice has been ultimately done.
The service to community is the lodestar in American Doctor, in which three American doctors, each from different backgrounds, Palestinian, Jewish and Zoroastrian, respectively, are united by a shared commitment to saving lives. Dr Thaer Ahmad, Dr Mark Perlmutter and Dr Feroze Sidhwa travel to Gaza to work in hospitals under extreme pressure, forced to make impossible decisions with limited resources and damaged infrastructure. American Doctor places us inside these spaces, revealing both the devastation of war and the demands of their work. Back in the US, they speak out publicly, challenging those in power. Director Poh Si Teng delivers a confrontational and deeply human film that reveals the horrors of this conflict while holding onto the possibility of compassion expressed through actions.
Amadou & Mariam is the extraordinary story of Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia which begins in 1975. The duo, first known as “The Blind Couple From Mali”, have given the world fifty years of music and love. The married couple, both of whom lost their sight as young children, have performed globally, spreading their unique brand of infectious joy and attracting the attention of some of the pop world’s leading musicians. Filmed in Spain, France and war-torn Mali during the recording of their final album, this lovingly assembled documentary takes us beyond the music and deep into the beautiful hearts of guitar virtuoso Amadou, who died last year, and heavenly-voiced singer Mariam. Damon Albarn, Manu Chao and Chris Martin also appear in a film that makes you want to dance, cheer and cry all at the same time.
In the same period but in another part of the world, the musical, The Rocky Horror Show had its inaugural 1973 staging with the cheeky plot of the innocent Brad and Janet, later played by Susan Sarandon in the movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show, stumbling upon the cross-dressing mad scientist, Dr Frank-N-Furter, played by Tim Curry. Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror captures how a London theatre play evolved into a rollicking cult phenomenon which celebrates seduction and transgression. Don your fishnet stockings and dance in the aisles:
“It’s just a jump to the left,
And then a step to the right,
Put your hands on your hips
You bring your knees in tight”
Coincidentally, The Rocky Horror Show starts at the Pieter Toerien Montecasino Main Theatre in Johannesburg on June 12, so you can catch the documentary and then go watch the musical, starring the ever fabulous Craig Urbani stepping back into the stilettos of the iconic Dr Frank-N-Furter.
Encounters South African International Documentary Festival is on at multiple venues in Cape Town, Joburg and Pretoria from June 4 to 14.
