Women’s films on Saturday to commemorate National Woman’s Day

To end off the Africa World Documentary Film Festival week, District Six Museum and UWC Education Department will host a day of films by women film makers: South Africans – Elise Fernandez, Nadine Cloete, Esley Philander; Haitian-American Rachelle Salnave; and self-described ‘multi-ethnic’ Jade Gibson. In addition, we will feature the Dan Yon biopic on songstress Sathima Bea Benjamin

SATURDAY 8 AUGUST 2015

12h00 – 17h30

DISTRICT SIX MUSEUM HOMECOMING CENTRE

15 Buitenkant Street, Cape Town

Background information: http://www.africaworldfilmfestival.com/

12h00 – 13h05	La Belle Vie: The Good Life (62 mins) Haiti, USARachelle Salnave	A story about a Haitian-American filmmaker, Rachelle Salnave’s journey to discover her Haitian roots by examining the complexities of the Haitian society as it pertains to the overall political and economic dichotomy in Haiti. Using her own personal family stories interconnected with capturing the voices of Haitians and experts overall, this film chronologically uncovers the rationale behind its social class system but also how it has affected the Haitian-American migration experience as well. With the proliferation of political turmoil, poverty, and now an earthquake shattered nation, the documentary beckons all to lay down their arms, be it the tangible weapons of death and pain or the psychological and spiritual tools of division and prejudice, and work as one to rebuild and prosper in the name of a new and stronger Haiti.This film in the end invokes the question whether or not its tragic event will shift the consciousness of all Haitians (living in Haiti or abroad) by motivating them to unite to build a new Haiti.
13h30 – 13h45	BREAK
13h45 – 14h15	THE GOLDEN YEARS (1): Maria April (24 mins)Courtesy of SABCDirected by Nadine Cloete Produced by Elise Fernandez	Maria April – A story of an elderly woman who’s grandmother died years ago. Her bones were dug up by a white school teacher who used it in his biology class. Today the school says they own the bones and that the family cannot prove that the bones belong to them. All that is left of it is the skull and it is kept in a Typex box..
14h30- 15h00	THE GOLDEN YEARS (2): Fatima Dike (24 mins)Courtesy of SABCDirected by Esley Philander and Elise Fernandez Produced by Elise Fernandez	Fatima Dike – A story about the first black woman to become a published playwright. Sis Fatts (as we know her) deals with the loss of her son, her grandson and her brothers all being murdered at different stages of her life. She is a playwright and activist.
15h00 – 15h30	THE GOLDEN YEARS (2): Katrina Esau (24 mins)Courtesy of SABCDirected by Nadine Cloete Produced by Elise Fernandez	A story of an 80+ year old woman in the Norther Cape who is fighting to keep a dying language known as Nu! alive.
15h30 – 15h50	BREAK
15h50 – 16h20	WISH YOU WERE HERE (8 mins)Jade Gibson	A material object is seen and categorised as a visual referent within the mind, where, linked with its contextual associations and other referents, it becomes part of visual memory, both individual and collective. This short art film explores how ‘objects’ in the past, as in photographs, books, experiences and film media, shape unconscious perceptions of how we encounter ‘objects’ in the present. In the case of the short art film ‘Wish You Were Here’, the object is myself. I present as an ethnographic art ‘object’, in order to examine the mis-identification and projections of others who create me as being of multiple and different ethnic identities and provenances. Although essentially a playful piece, the work also draws on and relates to more disturbing connotations; the phenotyping and determination of racial ‘types’ in the past and present, the deliberate construction in the composition of the ‘ethnographic’ photograph and film, and the impact of racial and ethnic stereotyping in the present, despite the world being increasingly presented as a more and more genetically and electronically interconnected space.Being of mixed ethnicity, apparently Scottish/Irish/Spanish and Filipino, yet growing up in the UK with adoptive parents and thus having no cultural knowledge of Filipino culture, and never having been there, I find myself constantly mis-identified by how I appear to others. This is often initially with absolute certainty by those who see me, as being identified as a number of different, and often quite diverse, ethnicities. Over the years, I was curious what images and associations might exist in the people’s heads who mis-identified me, and how these might interplay with images of ‘ethnic stereotypes’ shaped through images in the past, as well as present.
16h20 – 17h30	SATHIMA’S WINDSONG (54 mins)Dan Yon	Sathima’s Windsong is about the life and times of South African jazz singer, Sathima Bea Benjamin, whose musical creations were often in the shadow of her husband, jazz musician Abdullah Ibrahim. The film is shot primarily in New York, Cape Town but opens with short of the Island of St Helena, birthplace of Sathima’s grandmother. It returns to the ocean to signal travel, ‘routes’ and jazz as metaphors for her life-history. In her apartment of the Chelsea Hotel Apartment, Sathima’s home for more than thirty years, she patches together her journeys from apartheid South Africa and its ‘patterns of brokenness’ to Europe, and a chance meeting and a recording with Duke Ellington in Paris in 1963, to the highs and lows of making a life for herself and family in New York. The narrative of her journeys is interwoven with her music and the reflections of folks in South Africa and New York who know her work thus making this film both a celebration of Sathima’s music as well as a reflection on the historical context that helped shape it. The film takes it title from Sathima’s haunting composition, Windsong, which, like this film, is itself is a reflection upon displacement, exile, belonging and longing.
CLOSING WORDS