WINDHOEK– AfricAvenir, Independence Avenue Films, and Uhuru Productions take the South African award winning film about the real events of Marikana, Miners Shot Down to the Erongo region.
Co-funded by the National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF) and the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), this South African documentary by Rehad Desai is like nothing you have ever seen before. The film is a blistering criticism of the government’s deadly response to striking miners in Marikana in 2012. The story made headlines worldwide, and the commission of inquiry is ongoing. Using the POV of the Marikana miners, Miners Shot Down, follows the strike at one of South Africa’s platinum mines from day one, showing the courageous but isolated fight waged by a group of low paid workers. The screening will be attended by the film director Rehad Desai and Jobu Mzozo, Marikana Support Campaign, and Mzoxolo Magidiwana, a Marikana miner.
The film will be presented to the Erongo region at following venues and dates:
03.10., 7pm, NUNW Hall, Swakopmund, Ratatoka Street, near Mondesa
04.10., 4pm, Municipality Hall, Arandis
04.10., 7pm, Swakopmund Museum, Lecture Hall, Swakopmund, near the lighthouse
Entrance to all screenings is free.
“We’re going to go for a very fresh look,” declares Carla Dias of South Africa’s NFVF in a Variety interview regarding the presentation of South African films in Cannes. Dias says Miners Shot Down reflects the growing spirit and conviction of South African filmmakers who are “not worried about criticising our own government.” “They’re not scared to tell (this story),” she says. “Look how far we’ve come and we can still make films like this,’” says Dias. “That for me is freedom.”
The film won the Best South African Documentary Award at the Durban International Film Festival and the Amnesty International Human Rights award in July 2014. It furthermore won the Vaclav Havel Award, One World Film Festival, Prague, Czech Republic, 2014 – Best Film Camera Justitia Award, Movies That Matter, The Hague, Holland, 2014 – Best Film Aung San Suu Kyi Award, Human Rights Human Dignity International Film Festival, Myanmar, 2014 – Best Film Special Choice Award, Encounters South African, International Documentary Film Festival, South Africa, 2014.
In the six short months since it was released, Miners Shot Down has been screened to large numbers of people at film festivals across the globe, in Europe, Asia, Africa, North America and Australasia, and will be shown in a host of festivals over the coming months, including special 20 Years of Democracy screenings in Berlin and New York. Several festivals have given the film opening night status – One World, Prague, Sheffield Documentary Festival, UK and iRepresent in Lagos, Nigeria.
An initial week-long cinema release of the film at Ster Kinekor’s Cinema Nouveau was extended to a three week run in key cinemas, due to popular demand. The Bioscope Cinema in Johannesburg has also shown the film and repeated this in the run up to the 16th August, the second anniversary of the massacre.
Public petitions were handed over to the SABC to broadcast the film on their channels too.
In South Africa, in addition to a cinema release, over 160 impact screenings have taken place to date in universities, schools, community halls, mining towns, unions meetings and churches, reaching over 20,000 people in South Africa. The film has been picked up by no less than seven international broadcast channels, including more recently Al Jazeera English and North America aired the film from the 13th August onwards, just prior to the second anniversary of the massacre.
Rehad Desai is one of South Africa’s best-known documentary filmmakers and the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Uhuru Productions. A former political exile, Desai worked as a trade union organiser and as a Director of a HIV prevention NGO before entering the film and television industry as a current affairs journalist. He has a Masters in Social History and post-graduate degree in TV and film producing (AVEA) and a post-graduate diploma in documentary (Eurodoc). He has directed over 20 documentaries, many of which have seen international broadcast and been accepted into numerous festivals, receiving critical acclaim. One of his films, The Battle of Johannesburg (SA, 2010, 72 min) AfricAvenir screened in 2013 at the Polytechnic of Namibia, Department of Architecture.