Black Documentary Filmmakers on ‘Disruption,’ ‘Revisiting History’

The disruptive energy of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter actions has shifted the dialog round storytelling about underrepresented and marginalized communities, even because the backlash within the U.S. and different international locations has swung the pendulum to the (far) proper, placing lots of these positive aspects in danger.

However whereas the Trump administration’s efforts to roll again DEI initiatives are the newest harbinger of a cultural correction that threatens to show again the clock to a darker previous, Black documentary filmmakers on the Joburg Movie Competition stated they’re seeking to seize this second to disrupt and rethink broadly accepted historic narratives, particularly across the Black expertise. 

“We’re having so many reckonings, and we’re actually attempting to take care of histories which were introduced to us, that we’re now saying, ‘We have to disrupt this,’” stated the British filmmaker Eloïse King (“The Shadow Students”). “We have to acknowledge that the histories which were shared…are ones that don’t essentially belong to us and aren’t essentially true.”

King was collaborating in a panel dialogue this week on the JBX market in Johannesburg alongside South African filmmakers Sara Chitambo-Hatira (“Black Individuals Don’t Get Depressed”), Naledi Bogacwi (“Banned”) and Mmabatho Montsho (“Blood and Water”). The dialog, which was introduced in collaboration with trade physique SWIFT (Sisters Working in Movie and Tv), spotlighted the efforts of Black documentary filmmakers to reframe narratives round underrepresented and marginalized communities.

The discuss explored the methods wherein the filmmakers faucet into each private and collective narratives to inform tales that problem, subvert and upend dominant tropes — what Chitambo-Hatira described as “rewriting and documenting the reality of people that didn’t have the voice earlier than.”

The director’s feature-length debut examines psychological well being stigmas in Black communities, specializing in melancholy and the perceptions surrounding it in Africa. It displays her effort to offer “an alternate historical past, an alternate fact” to generally held beliefs about psychological well being on the continent whereas additionally exploring biases round Black ache and struggling.

King, whose documentary focuses on the multibillion-dollar “pretend essay” trade in Kenya, highlighted the work of the panelists in “reclaiming” tales about Black lives. 

“By having a lens that’s coming from an individual who traditionally has not had the chance to doc their group…[and] by with the ability to navigate the nuance of how we exist in these areas, is such a basic a part of this reclamation,” she stated.

“The Shadow Students,” which premiered at IDFA and performed this week on the Joburg Movie Competition, displays the director’s broader curiosity in “cultural turning factors, and likewise institutional legislative turning factors” unfolding in societies in flux. “Typically what is going on on the floor is being introduced as progress,” she stated. “And I wish to ask: For who?”

Bogacwi’s documentary “Banned,” in regards to the outlawed apartheid-era motion movie “Joe Bullet,” explores how the marketing campaign in opposition to the film — the primary South African function movie with an all-Black forged — was a part of wider censorship efforts by the apartheid authorities to not solely silence dissent however stamp out pleasure and artistic expression in Black communities.

Whereas the occasions it depicts transpired half a century in the past, Bogacwi related the plight of “Joe Bullet” with the continuing struggles of Black artists in South Africa’s artistic group, pointing to current court docket battles between native actors and broadcasters over royalty funds. “We’re nonetheless experiencing [exploitation], simply on a special stage,” she stated. Such episodes show that “revisiting historical past is important” for documentary filmmakers.

Their efforts, although, typically put them at odds with institutional gatekeepers. Among the many commissioners at main broadcasters and streaming platforms, stated Mmabatho, “there appears to be an unstated rule that individuals…don’t wish to see social issue-driven content material. Individuals simply wish to see true crime or actuality reveals.” Bogacwi insisted that that shouldn’t deter documentarians with a strong story to inform.

“I don’t suppose we’re going to be a technology that modifications something if we’re at all times tip-toeing [around gatekeepers],” she stated. “We don’t know what the viewers desires till they get it.”

King, in the meantime, positioned the filmmakers’ struggles inside a broader continuum of repression of Black and different marginalized communities whereas providing a strong corrective to that legacy. “In historical past, individuals have typically taken energy from us,” she stated. That has typically obscured the very fact “that we had [power], and it wasn’t theirs to soak up the primary place.”

The Joburg Movie Competition runs March 11 – 16.