Coming to NYC’s Maysles Cinema for the African Film Festival and Doc Watchers series “Five Days of African Docs” this Saturday, May 4: DEAR MANDELA
Dara Kell and Christopher Nizza’s look at housing activism among South Africa’s poor premiered at Durban in 2011. Since then it’s screened at numerous fests, including Camden, One World, Brooklyn, and Zanzibar, as well as university and community screenings around the world.
As the South African generation born post-apartheid comes into its own, the promises made by the previous freedom fighters are found to be unfulfilled. Among the most contentious is the long-deferred plan to provide housing for the poor, who otherwise make due in hastily constructed shacks organized into shanytown slums. Despite the constitutional protection against forced evictions, a new law theoretically designed to curtail the growth of slums has empowered authorities to destroy unauthorized shacks, angering the populace and reinforcing a sense that the inequality once based on race has instead given way to one based on economics. Taking on this issue is the group Abahlali BaseMjondolo – the “people of the shacks” – who work to organize from within, educating shack dwellers about their rights, and take the government to court over the unconstitutionality of the Slums Act. Kell and Nizza profile some of the young leaders of the movement as they face death threats, imprisonment, and the anger of an older generation who don’t take kindly to disparaging words being leveled against the political party that freed them from the shackles of an unjust system – even if it might be repeating some of the mistakes of the past. While focused on the housing issue, the film eloquently speaks to the challenges facing the relatively young South African democracy as a whole – generational divides, political stagnancy, and the global problem of the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots.
what (not) to doc 