Film for thought at documentary festival

PRINT HEAD: Film for thought at documentary festival

The 26th edition of the Encounters South African International Documentary Film Festival opens next week and once again non-fiction film lovers are spoilt for choice with a selection of almost 50 international and South African features and shorts. They offer plenty to contemplate, from historical injustices to harsh lived realities and heroic efforts on the part of ordinary people to overcome the challenges of living on a planet that’s in the grip of irreversible climate damage. Tymon Smith looks at 10 highlights from this year’s programme.

Mother City

Beneath the much-celebrated, picturesque beauty of Cape Town lies an unresolved harsh and nasty reality — the desperate and determined fight of those who provide their labour to the privileged residents of the city for social housing in the inner city areas where they work. The battle to overcome the glaring apartheid spatial planning of the city is the subject of director Miki Redelinghuys and veteran investigative journalist Pearlie Joubert’s heartfelt, empathetic, six-years-in-the-making documentary. It follows activist Nkosikhona Swartbooi and the Reclaim the City movement’s fight to get the government of the Western Cape to deliver on its lip-service commitment to building inner city social housing. It's a David vs Goliath battle that paints an ugly picture of the province’s authorities and their allegiance to developers and money rather than the needs of many of their citizens. The film hits hard, reminding us that, for so many people in the democratic era, the struggle is still real.

Soundtrack to a Coup D’état

Belgian director Johan Grimonprez uses vibrant archival jazz music and poignant quotes from decades of writing about the Congo to weave a complex tale of greed, paranoia and the lasting consequences of Cold War-era political interference in this ambitious documentary essay. Grimonprez doesn’t use didactic methods to achieve his goal. Instead he asks the audience to piece together the truth by juxtaposing speeches of the murdered first leader of the country, Patrice Lumumba, with archival footage of the chaotic machinations of the CIA, along with footage of jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone and Dizzy Gillespie, who were used as unwitting pawns in a cultural campaign to distract attention from the US’s nefarious interventions. The consequences of these events, including the tragic murder of Lumumba, created the turbulent, violently unstable conditions persisting in one of the continent’s largest, most resource rich and strategically important nations today.

My Mercury

For more than three decades, director Joelle Chesselet has been fascinated by the story of her brother Yves who, in the 1980s, left the comforts of his everyday life to travel to the remote Mercury Island off the coast of Namibia to try remove 15,000 seals and save the endangered bird population there. Using Yves’ written and video diaries and hours of footage she shot during visits, Chesselet’s film — co-directed with Pippa Ehrlich of the Oscar-winning My Octopus Teacher — traces his Sisyphean struggle to achieve a goal that turns out to demand more from him than either of them imagined. It's a deeply affecting personal film about the toll Yves' work took on him, and an urgent warning about the choices facing humanity as the time bomb of climate change ticks.

Black Box Diaries

In 2017, young Japanese journalist Shiori Ito found herself the unwanted centre of national attention and outrage when she publicly accused popular television reporter Noriyuki Yamaguchi of raping her in a hotel room two years earlier. Determined to see her abuser punished, Ito fought in the country’s courts to bring Yamaguchi to justice in the face of increasing obstacles placed in her way by corrupt, patriarchal authorities and threats from his high-powered political friends, who included the former prime minister Shinzo Abe. She published Black Box, a book detailing her experiences, which the documentary uses as the basis for its depressing, scary detailing of her battle to hold her abuser and the conservative, patriarchal society of Japan to account. Dramatic, tense and thrilling, it’s a powerful tribute to Ito’s courage and a call to bring about change in a society willing to turn a blind eye to the evils of powerful men.

Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg

At the height of the counterculture movement of swinging 60s London the enigmatic model and actress Anita Pallenberg captured public consciousness, first as the girlfriend of Rolling Stones founder member Brian Jones and then, to the shock and outrage of many, as the partner of fellow Stone, Keith Richards. Admired, reviled and misunderstood in equal measure, Pallenberg — the mother of three children with Richards, who fell deep into the grunge of drug addiction with him during the legendary substance-abusing rockstar’s lowest period — continued to be a beacon of the era’s free-spirited excesses and style even as she retreated from public life. After her death in 2017, Pallenberg’s children discovered a manuscript for an unpublished memoir. The words and memories of her fully-lived life form the core of directors Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill’s documentary. Thanks to extensive archival research and interviews with her closest friends, it sheds light on the rock ‘n roll muse’s journey of self-creation from her birth into a conservative German family to her escape to ‘60s London where she became a powerful force on the culture — on her own terms and against gender stereotypes.

Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano

In 2020, a terrifying explosion ripped through the Lebanese capital of Beirut, killing more than 200 people, injuring thousands and offering another depressing blow to the city once described as the Paris of the Middle East. It was also a devastating experience for the cast and crew of Costa Brava, a long-planned feature film to be directed by Beirut resident Mounia Akl. Akl’s mother can be heard on the phone in  the opening of director Cyril Aris's film about the making of the film, telling her to give up on Beirut and Lebanon and make a life for herself anywhere else in the world. But Akl decides to persevere. Aris's fly-on-the-wall documenting of Akl and her team’s struggles to make the film in the wake of the devastation of the explosion; the social unrest it leads to as people demand answers from a corrupt government; and the unexpected turmoil caused by the onset of Covid restrictions, becomes a satisfyingly portrait of a people who, despite many reasons to despair at the state of their homeland, manage to persevere thanks to a shared creative passion and commitment.

Every Little Thing

For two decades, the arrival of summer in Los Angeles brought with it the beginning of a frustrating and heartbreaking but ultimately rewarding period in the life of Terry Masear, a widowed former academic and writer, who offers her services to the city’s residents as they encounter injured and flustered hummingbirds among those that flock there ahead of their migration in the colder months of the year. Director Sally Aitken follows Masear over the course of a single season of rehabilitation at the centre she’s constructed at her home, introducing us to a variety of memorable hummingbird characters as they work, with Masear’s committed help, towards recovering in time to make their journey elsewhere. Delicate, heartfelt and featuring impressive camera techniques offering detailed insight into the physical prowess of the birds, it’s a film that offers a moving tribute to these tiny miracles of nature and the woman who's devoted her life to giving them a helping hand.

A Fidai Film

Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari has created a powerful tribute to the history of the everyday life of his people in this brilliant experimental film that uses a previously suppressed visual archive seized by the Israeli Defence Force from the Palestinian Research Centre in Beirut during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. In Aljafari’s hands it becomes a tool to reclaim the visual history of the Palestinian people, now under greater threat than ever. It counteracts much of the official mythmaking key to Israel’s justification of its violent oppression of its neighbours for the better part of eight decades.

Our Land, Our Freedom

Kenyan filmmakers Meena Nanji and Zippy Kimundu offer an uncomfortable but vital counter story to the official version of Britain’s behaviour in their country during the era of the so-called “Mau Mau rebellion” in the dying days of colonial rule. Drawing on documents uncovered by Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian Caroline Elkins in her 2006 book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, the film uses testimony from survivors to show the brutality of the colonial authorities’ treatment of rebel fighters. It provides a sobering, difficult to watch reassessment of a period in which the real history was suppressed by British authorities. It shows the long struggle for recompense by their victims.

 The Encounters South African International Documentary Film Festival takes place from June 20—30. For more information click here