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Africa’s premier documentary event, the annual Encounters South African International Documentary Festival, will take over Joburg and Cape Town next week with more than 60 acclaimed films on the line-up.
The programme has a decidedly political tone this year, with most of the selections focused on race, social justice, African history, current affairs and war.
Headlining the festival will be the Oscar-nominated I Am Not Your Negro, which looks at writer activist James Baldwin’s observations on race in the US. Another one will be from Nick Broomfield’s “brutally realistic” look at the life of Whitney Houston in Whitney: Can I Be Me.
Local offerings will include director Pascale Lamche’s 2017 Sundance-Award winning Winnie, on Winnie Madikizela-Mandela as well as the world premiere of Goldblatt, on acclaimed local artist David Goldblatt.
There will also be Miki Redelinghuys’s This Land, which examines a village forcibly removed under apartheid now under threat of another eviction from a mining company in bed with the Entembeni Zulu royal family, as well as Aryan Kaganof’s Metalepsis in Black on the Fees Must Fall movement.
Sifiso Khanyile’s Uprize! looks at the 1976 student protests that took place in the Cape and Vincent Moloi’s Skulls of My People depicts Namibia’s Hereo and Nama people’s struggle for the return of the skulls taken by German scientists after the 1904 genocide.
South African documentary world premieres will include Lucy Witt’s Dragan’s Lair, where she bravely confronts the stepfather who raped and abused her, while Nomakhomazi Derwarvin’s Indwe will look at the journey of the famous 1956 women’s march in Pretoria. Troupes of War: Ditrupa is a juxtaposition of black memory against white history.
More films from Africa will include The African Who Wanted to Fly from Gabon, Mama Colonel from the DRC and The Fruitless Tree from Niger.
On top of that, there’ll be a virtual reality component to the festival called Virtual Encounters, where guests can watch specially VR films using headsets.
Documentary enthusiasts, start marking your diaries.
* Encounters run from June 1 to 11 at the Labia, the Nouveau V&A Waterfront and Bertha Movie House, Isivivana Centre in Khayelitsha in Cape Town and the Bioscope and the Nouveau Rosebank in Johannesburg. Go to encounters.co.za for schedules and bookings
