Real Stories from a Free South
A series featuring stories about life in South Africa, 10 years after the end of apartheid.
How have the ten years of freedom from apartheid since Nelson Mandela's election in May, 1994 affected the lives of ordinary South Africans? In 2003, South African Broadcasting 1 -- the most widely-watched channel in South Africa, with the support of the National Film and Video Foundation -- commissioned fourteen emerging filmmakers from different classes and racial groups to make video portraits of South African society today.
In some cases, change was not as important as maintaining the social structures which had helped people survive the apartheid era. In others, apartheid's demise raised questions about identity in the new multiracial state. For still others, it offered a new life bright with opportunities, though with lingering shadows from the past.
California Newsreel has chosen five of the fourteen original programs which offer viewers a cross-section of these themes. All in all, REAL STORIES FROM A FREE SOUTH AFRICA is a fascinating experiment in empowering people to tell their own life stories as they are unfolding. It provides a unique grassroots view of the first decade of one of the most ambitious and radical experiments in social reconstruction in human history.
Running Time
279 mins
Nb videos
5 videos included
Kanopy ID
1143267
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Subjects
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5 videos in this collection
Hot Wax
Ivy is a big, bubbly black woman who managed to run her own beauty salon surreptitiously during the dark days of apartheid. She lives in Alexandra, a restless and poor…
Cinderella of the Cape Flats
Everyday, the working class Coloured women in the garment industry of the windswept flats around Cape Town toil anonymously to make clothes so that other women will look beautiful. Invariably…
Belonging
Born into exile in Britain as the daughter of political emigres, Kethiwe Ngcobo and her family returned to their longed-for homeland, South Africa in 1994.
Now, ten years later, Kethiwe…
Umgidi (Shadow Dancing)
When Sipho, a former Robben Island inmate for 5 years gets a call from his father to help convince his reluctant younger brother to get circumcised, he procrastinates. Then, he…
Nabantwa Bam' (With My Children)
This film is a fascinating case study of the emergence of social classes even within the same South African family.
Two brothers live with their successful and ambitious mother, a…
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