Encounters Documentary Festival 2017
The Encounters Documentary
Festival has been an annual film event in South Africa since 1999, taking place
in both Cape Town and Johannesburg. This year, the 19th Encounters
South African International Documentary Festival will run from 1 June to 11
June, with screenings at the V&A Nouveau, the Labia, and the Bertha Movie
House in Cape Town, and at the Rosebank Nouveau and the Bioscope in
Johannesburg. Darryl Els, the festival director, reports that over 70 local and
international features and shorts will be screened, no fewer than 32 of which
are South African and 19 are world premieres.
Click here to see the entire
19th Encounters South African International Documentary Festival
programme, including booking and ticket price information, the entire selection
of films, the festival schedule, and other features.
The festival receives support
from a whole host of sponsors, including the National Film and Video Foundation
(an agency of the South African Department of Arts and Culture), the Bertha
Foundation, Al Jazeera, various commercial funders, as well as other branches
of government cultural agencies. The Wikipedia article on the festival also
reports that many overseas festivals and distributors programme from the
Encounters Documentary Festival when looking for African content in documentary
categories. The festival includes a number of workshops where attendees may
engage with these sponsors and other strategic partners, with opportunities to
meet funders, see presentations on publicity campaigns for documentary
producers, see presentations on producing a debut feature, participate in
discussions on the state of documentary filmmaking in South Africa, hear panels
on breaking into the South African film industry, hear individual filmmakers
talk about their own experiences and issues important to them, and listen to discussions
on the forms and possibilities of documentary filmmaking. There are also
sessions hosted by Al Jazeera that filmmakers, industry members, and observers
may take part in that involve pitching and commenting on new ideas for
documentaries, and a lab for filmmakers to get a chance to work on their films
in post-production with an editing mentor. The information and schedules for
all these events are in the programme.
The main awards given at the
festival, sponsored by Backsberg, are the Audience Awards – one for the best
South African documentary, and one for the best international documentary.
(Ballots may be cast by all attendees at all screenings.) This year, for the
first time, there will also be a Youth Jury, which will vote on and present Encounters
Youth Experience (EYE) Award for the best South African short. The four jurors
are each film students at South African universities between the ages of 19 and
23. This will form part of the festival’s first Encounters Youth Experience,
which will specifically engage with young audiences to discuss the craft and
form of documentary filmmaking. Special screenings and talks will be held in Cape
Town.
The slate of films being
screened at the festival are split into three main selections: South African
& African, Swiss Focus, and International. Most of the titles are unknown
to me, but a few stand out as items of particular interest. First, a title I am
familiar with is I Am Not Your Negro,
Raoul Peck’s American documentary adapted from an unfinished manuscript by
James Baldwin, Remember This House.
That text is given in voice-over narration by Samuel L. Jackson and studies the
lives of three slain civil rights heroes – Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcom X,
and Medgar Evers. The film was nominated for best documentary at this year’s
Academy Awards. A documentary on the life of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Winnie, will also be screened, which won
the World Cinema Directing Award in the documentary category at Sundance earlier
this year. Life, Animated is another
of this year’s Oscar-nominated documentaries, and follows an autistic boy who
was brought out of his shell through engaged viewings of Disney movies. Many of
the other featured films deal with various pertinent issues of the day: the
coup in Madagascar, devastation in Aleppo, the embattled Egyptian comedian
Bassem Youssef, rape and abuse in South Africa, the struggle of the Herero and
Nama people in Namibia who sought the return of their ancestor’s remains from
Germany, Brexit, fake news in the age of Trump, the killing of Michael Brown in
Ferguson, asylum seekers and refugees in Europe, the legacy of forced removals
during apartheid, #FeesMustFall, the current disappointment of struggle
stalwarts, and the collisions of black memory with white history in South Africa.
Another exciting part of the
festival is the Virtual Encounters selection, hosted in cooperation with the
Goethe-Institut South Africa. This features a number of multi-platform
multimedia works, such as virtual reality, and interacting and video gaming
works. These will all be shown at the Goethe-Institut in Johannesburg and The
American Corner in Cape Town. Al Jazeera will also be showing a few of their
interactive web documentaries.
Once more, see the programme
for more information.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Enter your unrestrained arguments here