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Crimes of Both Past and Present a Common Thread for South African Filmmakers at Durban Festival
From the injustices of the apartheid era to the pervasive street crime today, South Africa's brutal reality proves fertile ground for storytelling.
Bogacwi’s documentary explores how the campaign against “Joe Bullet” — the first South African feature film with an all-Black cast — and the wider censorship efforts of the apartheid government were “not only about suppressing political dissent but also about silencing the everyday lives and aspirations of Black people,” the director says. Ironically, though, the carefree depictions of everyday life that were banned under apartheid are still in scant supply among this year’s crop of South African feature films in Durban, stressing how a country still riven by inequality and facing an uncertain economic and political future has, for many, reached a tipping point. This marks the second feature for the director, who built a following in film school with his YouTube channel Small House Brainiacs, where he launched his no-budget debut, “Noon to Sunrise.” It’s roughly 600 miles from Ga-Molapo to Durban — about the same distance as a round-trip drive from Hollywood to Modesto — but Aphane’s journey from the village to the big screen would have been unthinkable in the days before democratic rule.
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