Diverse doccies at Durban International Film Festival

BANNED

Naledi Bogacwi’s documentary tells the engaging story of the making of cult 1973 South African film Joe Bullet. Starring Ken Gampu as the titular character and featuring appearances by legendary singer Abigail Kubeka and veteran actor and Sophiatown character Sol Rachilo, the film was intended by its director, Tony Van Der Merwe, to be an aspirational James Bond-esque piece of action escapism for black audiences. Instead, it was promptly banned by the apartheid censors shortly after its premier at the Eyethu Cinema in Soweto. Featuring interviews with Kubeka, Rachilo, Van Der Merwe and the late Mbongeni Ngema, the documentary shines a spotlight on the film and a brief moment of hope, brutally crushed by the absurdism of apartheid censorship.

COPA 71

For many fans of Women’s soccer, the sport’s first World Cup was played in 1991 and was won by the US. But as directors Rachel Ramsay and James Erskine’s inspiring documentary shows, there was another unofficial and unrecognised by Fifa women’s soccer world tournament that took place in Mexico in 1971. It now earns its place in the history books, much to the outraged surprise of many of the stars of women’s soccer who, thanks to Fifa’s fear and patriarchal bullying, hadn’t known about it until now. Featuring rich archival footage and interviews with members of the teams who competed in the “Copa ‘71” and football historian David Goldblatt, the film brings the pioneering event out of the sidelines of history onto the main stage where it belongs.

CITY OF WIND

Mongolian director Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir’s quietly impressive debut feature is a spiritually infused drama set against the backdrop of the urban sprawl of the city of Ulaanbaatar. It follows the trials of a 17-year-old Gen-Z-er who has the responsibility of history and tradition thrust on his shoulders when he becomes the spiritual shaman for his community while struggling to balance that role with the ordinary struggles of being a teenager. What follows is a sensitive and moving coming-of-age story that explores the hopes, fears and challenge facing Mongolia’s largest demographic.

DAHOMEY

Winner of the Golden Bear for Best Film at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, director Mati Diop’s documentary is a complex, multi-layered meditation on the hot-potato topic of the restitution of historical objects seized by colonial powers from Africa, and the battle for their restitution. Following the return of 26 objects from the museum where they have been held in Paris for centuries to their ancestral home in Nigeria, the film brings the topic to intelligent and far-ranging life and asks big questions about the idea of home, tragic loss and the symbolic importance of restitution as a means of beginning to address the terrible history of colonialism and its still long-reaching consequences. 

DISCO AFRIKA

Madagascan director Luck Razanajaona’s debut feature paints a far-ranging portrait of the difficult history and everyday struggles of the country’s people in a globalised age. When the lives of two young men who work in the island’s sapphire mines are brutally shattered by the forces of political tumult raging around them, one of them must make a tragic journey home through a country torn apart by riots and pro-democracy protests. There he begins to discover something about himself and his family’s history that will change his life and force him to make tough choices about how he wishes to live and what the future can still hold in a land where the forces of corruption, chaos and resistance are in a continual battle for the soul of the nation.

FALLEN LEAVES

For the better part of four decades, Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki has been Europe’s master of deadpan humour and absurdist, droll observation of the ennui of modern life in the hyper-capitalist age. His latest, winner of the Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival continues to slyly fly the flag for the director’s unique brand of acutely observed social comedy that’s so deadpan, the laughs often sneak up on you a while after the jokes have been made. Set in modern day Helsinki but filmed with a nostalgic glow that recalls everything from classic Hollywood cinema, to the French New Wave and the dramas of German maverick Rainer Fassbender, the film tells the moving though funny story of the burgeoning romance between two lonely working class lovers — a grocery store clerk and a drunken metalworker — as they make a connection to see them through the dour drudgery of their pointless existences.

FOUR DAUGHTERS

Kaouther Ben Hania’s Oscar-nominated documentary uses impressive formal inventiveness to tell a compelling and difficult story about a Tunisian woman’s relationship with her daughters and, more broadly, the failed promises and shattered dreams of the country in the wake of the Arab Spring. Olfa is an ordinary woman whose life is indelibly changed after two of her four daughters disappear. Using actors to play the daughters in a series of reenactments, Ben Hania traces the story of Olfa and her daughters and the ways in which the tumultuous political upheavals of 2011 broke the family and Tunisia apart.

GREEN BORDER

Veteran Polish director Agnieszka Holland casts an unflinching and righteously accusatory eye on the hypocrisy of the attitudes of the governments of Poland and Belarus towards the terrible plight of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Africa in this wide-ranging drama set in the no-man’s-land of the forests that separate the two countries. There, families fleeing the war and upheaval of their homelands in search of a better life are treated like livestock, shuttled between the despairing intolerance of Belarus and the briefly hopeful promises of Poland and its EU membership status and all that’s supposed to promise. In reality, neither government cares about the refugees and both spend their time using them as political pawns in a power game in which they become new victims.

HOW TO HAVE SEX

British director Molly Manning Walker’s effective debut follows the brief but life-changing adventures of three teenage girls as they embark on a rites-of-passage, end-of-school-life holiday to Greece. There they intend to have as much sex and booze as possible, enjoying themselves to the max. Instead, as we slowly realise, what starts off as a hedonistic escape turns into a traumatic experience that raises difficult issues around consent and sexual violence that’s kept engaging by the strength of the performances by its talented young cast.

LEGACY: A DECOLONIZED HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA

Actor Tara Moore makes her directorial debut with this documentary, which is the opening night selection for this year’s festival. Taking a thoroughly present day approach informed by the failings of post-apartheid South Africa, the film traces the history of the country from colonialism through to apartheid and democracy, to examine the deep underlying causes of the inequality and racial injustices that we still face as a country. Featuring interviews with Wilhelm Verwoerd, the anti-apartheid grandson of the architect of grand apartheid Hendrik Verwoerd, historians, experts and struggle icons, the film links the present to the past and asks what’s needed if we are to move forward in ways that will finally benefit everyone.

MALU

Brazilian director Pedro Friere’s feature debut tackles the difficult, personal subject of his mother, theatre actress Malu Rocha. It’s a chamber piece that echoes its subject’s theatre roots. The film follows a fictionalised relationship between mothers and daughters across three generations as they come to terms with their pasts in a ramshackle house on the outskirts of a Rio favela in the late 1990s. Malu is a 50-year-old bipolar, unemployed former veteran of Brazil’s political theatre scene, living alone with her aging and difficult mother in a house she once owned with her actor husband. When Malu’s daughter comes to visit she finds her mother trapped in a marijuana-induced haze of past glories and vainglorious dreams of building a cultural centre that’s soon to be revealed as far more chaotic than it is hopeful and stable. As Malu falls ill, her daughter must make a decision as to whether to help her mother or leave her to live out her last days alone in her empty house.

MASINGA: THE CALLING

Veteran South African music world director and cinematographer Mark Engels ventures into the thriller genre territory with this film set against the backdrop of growing Asian expansion into Africa and the spiritual traditions of the continent. Hakeem Kae-Kazim plays the titular character, an African-born, UK-based Interpol detective Masinga, who arrives in Maputo on the trail of a group of trafficked Ukrainian teenagers and the Russian mob boss behind their ordeal. Soon he finds himself at the centre of a tentacled conspiracy that forces him to confront his own past and the difficult choices faced by Africans in the face of ruthless corruption and resource greed.

MEMORY

Peter Sarsgaard won the Best Actor Award at last year’s Venice Film Festival for his performance in Michael Franco’s moving drama about the connection between two broken people trying to fight against the unreliability of their memories. Sarsgaard plays Saul, a widower struggling with dementia who follows Sylvia (Jessica Chastain), a social worker and recovering alcoholic, home from a party one night, for no apparent reason. Troubled but empathetic to the fact that there's something wrong with him, Sylvia takes on the job of working as a carer for Saul. What begins as a relationship of dependency slowly morphs into a romantic one for two people affected in different ways by their memories – Saul by his inability to hold onto them and Sylvia by her inability to escape hers. The results are a murky but humane web of truth, lies and complex emotions, held together by a pair of sterling performances form Sarsgaard and Chastain.

PROPERTY

Daniel Brandeira’s feature about the confrontation between a group of unjustly discarded Brazilian farmworkers and the rich couple who own the land they work on is part psychological thriller, part Marxist treatise and wholly engaging. After a traumatic encounter with a desperate criminal leaves her shattered, the wife of a rich Brazilian property speculator leaves the city with her husband for what she imagines will be a recuperative trip to his family’s farm. What she doesn’t know is that her greedy husband has actually come to the farm to seal a deal with developers who intend to kick off the farmworkers and their families and turn the site into a hotel. When the workers learn of this plan, they revolt and demand answers and fair compensation from their former master. His wife, fearing for her life, escapes to their recently armour-plated car where she finds herself in a standoff against the angry workers. The battle becomes more than a simple “haves” versus “have nots” thriller as it morphs into a difficult debate about land, class and inequality in modern day Brazil.  

RISING UP AT NIGHT

In Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, everyday life is brutal, difficult and often conducted in darkness. Nelson Makengo’s documentary paints an impressionist picture of the struggles of different Kinshasa residents as they contend with the devastating effects of floods and the failed promises of the government’s long-delayed plans for the building of a power plant that's supposed to fix the capital city’s rampant electricity problems. Enveloped in darkness, Kinshasa’s despairing but resourceful citizens struggle bravely to make their own plans to survive in the dark and find hope within the seemingly insurmountable hopelessness of a situation visited on them by decades of neglect, corruption and callous official disregard.

THE SHOWERHEAD

Director Craig Tanner’s documentary closes this year’s festival and pays tribute to the free speech activism of groundbreaking political cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro, better known by his well-recognised moniker, Zapiro. Tracing the cartoonist’s career from an anti-apartheid activist to thorn in the side of South African democratic leaders and power brokers, the film celebrates its subject’s courage and refusal to backdown as he takes on those in power from Nelson Mandela to Thabo Mbeki and of course, his most offended and litigious subject, Jacob Zuma; often with hard-hitting satirical images that have sparked outrage, controversy and national debate and kept the country and those who shape its direction on their toes and jumping out of their comfortable chairs in shock, horror and rueful recognition.

• The Durban International Film Festival runs from 18-28 July. For more information visit ccadiff.ukzn.ac.za