Acclaim for local documentaries
SABC 1 has been showing a season of 15 "Steps for the Future" documentaries on Monday nights during their documentary slot, most of which have made their South African premieres. The collection of films has already been broadcast extensively on the international film festival circuit and a number have received some notable awards and nominations.
Steps for the future films have been receiving high acclaim on the international film festival circuit. South African director Brian Tilley recently received a special award for the greatest contribution to the protection of human rights for his documentary called It's My Life at the One World Film Festival in Prague.
The Ball, a short film set in Mozambique, was nominated for the 2002 Cannes Film Festival in May and won the International Student Jury Award for Best Children's Programme at the recent Banff Television Festival in Canada. South African produced Heavy Traffic was also nominated in the "Information Programmes" category for the Banff Rockie Awards.
Wa 'n Wina, in which filmmaker Dumisani Phakathi's explores his own community in the context of HIV/AIDS, has been selected to screen at Input 2002 in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. The Input film festival is celebrating its 25th year and Wa 'n Wina was screened on May 19th as part of a session entitled "Friends on Friends".
This week's screening is a provocative documentary by Karen Boswall, Dancing on the Edge, which follows two parallel journeys, a young girl moving towards life as an adult, and a young woman moving towards her premature death by AIDS. It is set in rural Mozambique, where traditional gender roles and poverty influence the fight to contain the spread of AIDS. Antonietta is HIV-positive and works as an AIDS counsellor in the city. But she takes her one healthy daughter to a remote village for initiation into sexuality. After a week of rituals and lessons on how to please a man, the daughter will become a woman and consequently be put at risk to contract HIV. Antonietta struggles with the contradictions of maintaining traditional customs while adapting to the reality of the modern world.
The 40-minute narrative film will be broadcast on SABC 1 on Monday 15th July at 22h00.
