The disruptive power of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements has shifted the conversation around storytelling about underrepresented and marginalized communities, even as the backlash in the U.S. and other countries has swung the pendulum to the (far) right, putting many of those gains at risk.
But while the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back DEI initiatives are the latest harbinger of a cultural correction that threatens to turn back the clock to a darker past, Black documentary filmmakers at the Joburg Film Festival said they’re looking to seize this moment to disrupt and rethink widely accepted historical narratives, especially around the Black experience.
“We’re having so many reckonings, and we’re really trying to contend with histories that have been presented to us, that we’re now saying, ‘We need to disrupt this,’” said the British filmmaker Eloïse King (“The Shadow Scholars”). “We need to recognize that the histories that have been shared…are ones that don’t necessarily belong to us and aren’t necessarily true.”
King was taking part in a panel discussion this week at the JBX market in Johannesburg alongside South African filmmakers Sara Chitambo-Hatira (“Black People Don’t Get Depressed”), Naledi Bogacwi (“Banned”) and Mmabatho Montsho (“Blood and Water”). The conversation, which was presented in collaboration with industry body SWIFT (Sisters Working in Film and Television), spotlighted the efforts of Black documentary filmmakers to reframe narratives around underrepresented and marginalized communities.
The talk explored the ways in which the filmmakers tap into both personal and collective narratives to tell stories that challenge, subvert and upend dominant tropes — what Chitambo-Hatira described as “rewriting and documenting the truth of people who didn’t have the voice before.”
The director’s feature-length debut examines mental health stigmas in Black communities, focusing on depression and the perceptions surrounding it in Africa. It reflects her effort to provide “an alternative history, an alternative truth” to commonly held beliefs about mental health on the continent while also exploring biases around Black pain and suffering.
King, whose documentary focuses on the multibillion-dollar “fake essay” industry in Kenya, highlighted the work of the panelists in “reclaiming” stories about Black lives.
“By having a lens that is coming from a person who historically has not had the opportunity to document their community…[and] by being able to navigate the nuance of how we exist in these spaces, is such a fundamental part of this reclamation,” she said.
“The Shadow Scholars,” which premiered at IDFA and played this week at the Joburg Film Festival, reflects the director’s broader interest in “cultural turning points, and also institutional legislative turning points” unfolding in societies in flux. “Often what is happening on the surface is being presented as progress,” she said. “And I would like to ask: For who?”
Bogacwi’s documentary “Banned,” about the outlawed apartheid-era action film “Joe Bullet,” explores how the campaign against the movie — the first South African feature film with an all-Black cast — was part of wider censorship efforts by the apartheid government to not only silence dissent but stamp out joy and creative expression in Black communities.
While the events it depicts transpired half a century ago, Bogacwi connected the plight of “Joe Bullet” with the ongoing struggles of Black artists in South Africa’s creative community, pointing to recent court battles between local actors and broadcasters over royalty payments. “We’re still experiencing [exploitation], just on a different level,” she said. Such episodes prove that “revisiting history is essential” for documentary filmmakers.
Their efforts, though, often put them at odds with institutional gatekeepers. Among the commissioners at major broadcasters and streaming platforms, said Mmabatho, “there seems to be an unspoken rule that people…don’t want to see social issue-driven content. People just want to see true crime or reality shows.” Bogacwi insisted that that shouldn’t deter documentarians with a powerful story to tell.
“I don’t think we are going to be a generation that changes anything if we are always tip-toeing [around gatekeepers],” she said. “We don’t know what the audience wants until they get it.”
King, meanwhile, positioned the filmmakers’ struggles within a broader continuum of repression of Black and other marginalized communities while offering a powerful corrective to that legacy. “In history, people have often taken power from us,” she said. That has often obscured the fact “that we had [power], and it wasn’t theirs to take in the first place.”
The Joburg Film Festival runs March 11 – 16.
