Durban — The 45th edition of the Durban International Film Festival has a stellar line-up, and both the opening and closing films centre on politics.
As the promise of a Government of National Unity (GNU) embarks upon the task of uniting the country to dismantle the staggering inequality, Tara Moore’s film Legacy: The Decolonized History of South Africa will open the Durban International Film Festival at the Suncoast Cinecentre on Thursday.
Moore uses her diverse background and personal experience of living in both South Africa and Connecticut in the US as a unique vantage point from which to offer a perspective on her country of origin.
She interrogates the legacy of apartheid and the persistent inequality which continues 30 years into South Africa’s democracy.
Interviews with ministers who served in Nelson Mandela’s Cabinet – including Pallo Jordan, Barbara Masekela, Mac Maharaj and Jay Naidoo – offer timely reflections as President Cyril Ramaphosa and his Cabinet of the GNU chart a new future for the country.
Constitutional Court Justice Albie Sachs, who returned to South Africa from exile in 1990 after the unbanning of the ANC, offers his insights into the prevailing system and how South Africa is still haunted by the legacy of apartheid.
Wilhelm Verwoerd, the grandson of the architect of apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd, reckons with the past and the present in his frank and deeply personal understanding of the legacy of trauma to shine a light on the responsibility for restitution and reparation.
Former president Jacob Zuma’s scandal-ridden ascent, reign and ousting come under scrutiny in the festival’s closing film, Craig Tanner’s The Showerhead, which affords audiences an insight into the political landscape via the observations of political cartoonist Zapiro (Jonathan Shapiro).
The complexities of corruption, the subversion of the Constitution and the rule of law, and threats to free speech are conveyed with the subtle stroke of a pen.
The film considers freedom of expression in contemporary South Africa with reference to the boundaries tested in Zapiro’s cartoons and his resolute defiance of attempts to stifle his work, and affirms his continuing relevance.
Zapiro’s work which, as Brett Murray has said, “speaks for itself, clearly, articulately and is brazenly accurate”, is examined from his period as an anti-apartheid Struggle artist to his role as a progressive commentator and freedom of expression champion.
The documentary will have its world premiere on July 27, the closing night of the festival.
Produced by Videovision Entertainment’s Anant Singh, the documentary looks into 18 years of Zapiro’s work, especially the shower-fitting fixed to the head of the former president in cartoons, after his 2006 rape trial.
The film is also a story of Zapiro and his roots as a liberation artist and political detainee during apartheid, to his emergence as a steadfast defender of freedom of expression.
The documentary will highlight the importance of freedom of expression and the need to defend it. Zapiro’s work went against governments and corporations to protect this fundamental right. His steadfast defiance of censorship and how his work remains an important example of critique in a fragile democracy are laid bare in the film.
Tanner said he had always admired Zapiro.
“My hope is that, given the mounting attacks on freedom of expression as examined in the film, and borne out by the imprisonment and murder of journalists around the world, The Showerhead will affirm the value and bravery of those who speak truth to power.
“I am privileged and feel proud to have The Showerhead selected as the closing-night film. This is particularly so given my association with the city in which I spent much of my life, and with the festival which I attended as a younger audience member and at which my two previous films had their international premieres.”
Singh said Shapiro, over three decades, had been an inspiration in his powerful vision with the pen.
Sunday Tribune