The Bioscope is proud to once again be a venue in the annual Encounters Documentary Film Festival, a true highlight on the South African cinema calendar. Book now to avoid disappointment!
Click on the picture to look at the programme and book tickets for The Bioscope:
• Encounters to host Al Jazeera Showcase, including multi-award-winning Bahrain: Shouting in the Dark and African-themed docs
• Presentation by Al Jazeera series producers and commissioning editors
• Opportunity for SA industry to pitch leading broadcaster
Al Jazeera English has signed on as one of the sponsors of this year’s Encounters South African International Documentary Festival, running from 7-24 June 2012.
As part of the deal, Africa’s most prestigious documentary festival will host an Al Jazeera showcase.
“Al Jazeera English is the leading news channel in the world, producing some of the most acclaimed documentaries anywhere,” says Mandisa Zitha, festival director at Encounters, pointing to a string of recent accolades for the broadcaster, like being named The Royal Television Society’s 2012 News Channel of the Year and winning a Peabody, the oldest award in electronic media, for its ground-breaking coverage of the Arab Spring. “We’re very excited to be partnering with them.”
Encouter’s Al Jazeera showcase includes Bahrain: Shouting in The Dark, about the 2011 Arab revolution that was abandoned by the Arabs, forsaken by the West and forgotten by the world. The controversial documentary won The Foreign Press Association Documentary of the Year, the George Polk Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the Scripps Howard Jack R. Howard Award for Television Reporting, among other accolades. Watch the promo:
The five other Al Jazeera English films on the programme demonstrate the broadcaster’s commitment to covering Africa’s stories.
Libya: Through The Fire focuses on Mohammed Nabbous, who returned from exile to set up an independent satellite television station to alert the world to Benghazi’s increasing peril. This remarkable and heart-breaking documentary embodies the story of the Arab Awakening and carries viewers through the historic events in Libya on a very human level. Watch the promo:
Africa Investigates was a world-first, giving some of Africa’s best journalists the resources and opportunity to pursue high-level investigative targets across the continent. Two episodes, Fool’s Gold and Spell of the Albino, will screen together as a double-header at Encounters. Watch the promo:
In Fool’s Gold, legendary Ghanaian investigative journalist Anas Aremayaw Anas goes undercover to expose a group behind the scams and confidence tricks that accompanied Ghana’s gold rush.
Spell of the Albino puts the focus on Tanzania, where albinos are still being savagely mutilated and murdered for their body parts – falsely believed to have magical properties.
Bitter Root goes to Northern Uganda, where two ex-commanders in The Lord’s Resistance Army, responsible for numerous brutalities against unarmed civilians, ask the tribal elders to implement Mato Oput, a traditional system of restorative justice involving perpetrators and victims. Watch the promo:
The Nigerian Connection investigates the trafficking of young girls from Nigeria to Italy for the sex trade, exposing how juju or black magic is used by organized crime to keep the girls in fear for their lives. Watch the promo:
South African Clifford Bestall, who won the Audience Award at Encounters in 2010 for The 16th Man, is also screening his Hillbrow-themed Between Heaven & Hell, which he shot for Al Jazeera English last year. Watch the promo:
Al Jazeera will also host an Industry Presentation on Monday, 11 June 2012 from 5-7pm at Protea Hotel Fire & Ice, New Church Street, Cape Town. Osama Saeed, head of international and media relations at Al Jazeera English, and Al Jazeera English commissioning editors Diarmuid Jeffreys, Dominique Young and Jon Blair will explain Al Jazeera’s approach, followed by a Q&A and informal drinks. Blair is a South African-born Oscar, Emmy and BAFTA-winner.
Both presentations have limited space available, so Encounters encourages industry to book early by emailing manager@encounters.co.za .
Al Jazeera English will also be hosting a pitching forum for African filmmakers. Read the Call for this here.
For more information, contact:
Oluko
Encounters International Documentary Festival
1st Floor,
27 Caledon Street
Cape Town
oluko@encounters.co.za
www.encounters.co.za
tel: +27 21 465 4686
fax: +27 21 461 6964
For the first time, Al Jazeera English, in partnership with Encounters, will conduct a one-day pitching session with filmmakers from South Africa and the rest of Africa in Cape Town. We are looking for powerful films that tell engaging stories in a meaningful way. Sixteen to twenty documentary filmmakers will get the opportunity to pitch to one of the only international broadcasters that focuses on the documentary film genre.
To be held on Monday, 11 June 2012 in Cape Town, three Commissioning Editors from Al Jazeera (see bio’s below) will see between 16 to 20 people. Each person will have a maximum of five minutes to pitch their film and there will be an additional 10 minutes allocated for feedback and questions from the panel. Visual aids will be provided for those that have DVDs or presentations during the pitch.
Al Jazeera English is an international news channel, holding over sixty bureaus spanning six continents. Since being established in 2006, it has continued to grow in reach and popularity due to its global coverage, especially from underreported regions. The channel currently broadcasts to over 250m households across 130 countries.
Al Jazeera English’s in-depth approach to journalism has won it numerous awards and accolades over the years. It is the current RTS News Channel of the Year and Freesat Best News Channel. In the last year, Al Jazeera English has also picked up the Columbia Journalism Award, a DuPont award, and a George Polk award.
Al Jazeera English is part of the Al Jazeera Network – one of the world’s leading media corporations, encompassing news, documentary and sport channels. Al Jazeera started out more than 15 years ago as the first independent news channel in the Arab world dedicated to covering and uncovering stories in the region. It is now a media network consisting of over 20 channels, including Al Jazeera Arabic, Al Jazeera English, Al Jazeera Balkans, Al Jazeera Sport, Al Jazeera Mubasher, Al Jazeera Documentary, the Al Jazeera Media Training and Development Center, and the Al Jazeera Center for Studies.
Jon Blair
South African-born Blair has been making documentaries for more than 30 years. He has won an Oscar, two Emmys, a British Academy Award and an International Documentary Association Distinguished Achievement Award, amongst other accolades. His documentary work has spanned current affairs, history and popular culture. Blair left South Africa permanently in 1966 when he was drafted into the Apartheid regime’s army, but returned illegally in 1976 to make the first film for international television about the Soweto Uprisings, ironically entitled There Is No Crisis. Blair is currently contracted to Al Jazeera English as Acting Commissioning Editor for Major Series, Specials and Discussion Programmes.
Dominique Young
Dominique is a Senior Producer based in Al Jazeera English’s bureau in London. She commissions a wide range of documentaries on African and Middle Eastern subject matter, for broadcast in the channel’s flagship observational documentary strand Witness, as well as other documentary seasons. Witness is the flagship, observational documentary strand on Al Jazeera English, broadcasting one 25’ film and one 48’ film each week. Witness films are character-led, first-person stories which set the context to the daily news agenda and provide an insight into key events of the day as they impact on the lives of ordinary people. Witness documentaries are inspirational and provocative, with a global resonance and appeal. As far as possible, our stories are told by local filmmakers and our films aim to showcase the work of established and emerging documentary talent from around the world.
Diarmuid Jeffreys
Diarmuid Jeffreys is an award-winning journalist and television producer with almost 30 years experience in the media industry. Since late 2008, he has been an Editor and Executive Producer at Al Jazeera English. Based in London, he is responsible for Al Jazeera English’s People & Power investigative current affairs programme and a range of other documentaries across the network. People & Power is a multi-award winning documentary current affairs and investigative strand. Broadcast throughout the year and with a new half-hour edition every week, it pursues stories from all over the world; combining hard-hitting, revelatory and incisive television journalism with high-quality filmmaking, probing deep into stories of global significance and investigating everything from political and corporate wrongdoing, human rights abuses and the origins of conflict to the plight of the world’s most vulnerable peoples.
Over the last 12 months it has filmed everywhere – from Pakistan to Peru, from the USA to Afghanistan, from Italy to Nigeria and especially across the Middle East as it went behind the scenes to produce award-winning coverage of dramatic events in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, Algeria and elsewhere. In 2011, Jeffries’ output also included several films as part of AJE’s much praised coverage of the Arab Awakening. In the last three years, his series have won an Amnesty Award for Best Television Documentary 2010, the Rory Peck Best Features Award 2011, Best Documentary 2011 from the Human Trafficking Foundation and twice (2010 and 2011) been commended in the Best Investigative Documentary category by the Association of International Broadcasters.
In May 2012, another of his recent series, Africa Investigates (in which African journalists target corruption and human rights abuses across their continent), won a One World Media Award. Previously Diarmuid has produced, directed and commissioned current affairs and investigative documentaries in the UK for the BBC (Newsnight, Panorama, The Money Programme), Channel 4 (Dispatches) and ITV (World in Action, This Week) as well as programmes for PBS in the US and other broadcasters around the world. He is also the author of three non-fiction books: The Bureau – Inside the FBI; Aspirin – The Remarkable Story of a Wonderdrug and Hell’s Cartel – IG Farben and the Making of Hitler’s War Machine.
Interested parties should send a one-page synopsis of their film, a one-page biography of the filmmaker, and complete contact details to oluko@encounters.co.za on or before Sunday, 27 May 2012.
Lesedi Oluko Moche
+27(21) 461 4686
oluko@encounters.co.za
Look out for the programme booklet which will hit the streets soon.
Graceland documentary Under African Skies to open Encounters
Diarise 7-24 June 2012 for Africa’s most prestigious documentary festival:
• Jon Blair Focus – a retrospective of SA’s first Oscar winner
• 2012 Oscar nominees: Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory & Wim Wenders’ Pina
• Kevin Macdonald’s must-see portrait of reggae icon Bob Marley
• New SA films by previous Encounters winners Bryan Little, Dylan Valley & Cliff Bestall
Under African Skies will open the 14th Encounters South African International Documentary Festival, which runs from 7-24 June 2012 in Cape Town and Johannesburg.
Directed by Emmy and Peabody winner Joe Berlinger, the documentary tells the inside story of Paul Simon’s trip to South Africa to record Graceland and his return last year to celebrate its 25th anniversary. The bestselling, Grammy-winning album introduced South African music to the world and has been included in numerous Best Album of All Time lists by the likes of Rolling Stone and Time, but the trip was heavily criticized at the time, as it undermined the cultural embargo against Apartheid.
Under African Skies was a favourite at Sundance earlier this year, where The Hollywood Reporter called it “pure bliss.”
South Africa’s first Oscar winner, Jon Blair, is this year’s first confirmed guest. Encounters will host Africa’s first retrospective of Jon’s work, including his Oscar-winning Anne Frank Remembered; his Emmy-winning Reporters at War: Dying To Tell a Story; and Dancing with the Devil, which explores Rio de Janeiro’s drug wars through the eyes of a drug lord, a cop and an evangelical preacher. Jon will also host a master class alongside the festival.
“This year’s programme is one of the strongest yet,” says festival director Mandisa Zitha. “We’ve managed to secure some of the most talked-about documentaries from across the world over the last year.”
Another of Berlinger’s films, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, which he co-directed with Bruce Sinofsky, will also screen at Encounters. This is the conclusion to his gripping, three-part courtroom drama about the West Memphis Three, who allegedly murdered three children in Arkansas, USA in 1993.
Purgatory was nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar in March, where it competed against another film in this year’s programme, Wim Wenders’ Pina, an exquisitely shot 3D tribute to German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch.
Marley, the definitive biography of reggae icon Bob Marley, is another highlight of this year’s festival. Directed by Oscar-winner Kevin Macdonald (Touching the Void, Last King of Scotland), Marley has a 93% rating from critic aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes for the current theatrical release in America. As New York’s The Village Voice wrote, “Thoroughly researched and packed with phenomenal archive footage, it’s a rousing tribute to a mesmerizing performer that forgoes blind hero worship.”
The festival also boasts new films by some of South Africa’s top documentary filmmakers. Bryan Little, who won the Audience Award for Best South African Film for Fokofpolisiekar at Encounters in 2009, returns with the world premiere of his beat-battle chronicle The African Cypher. Clifford Bestall, who won the same award in 2010 for The 16th Man, is screening his Hillbrow-themed Between Heaven & Hell, while Dylan Valley, whose Afrikaaps was the runner up in 2010, is also back with Jumu’a: The Gathering.
“We have something for everyone,” says Mandisa, pointing to a bumper lineup of documentaries dealing with a wide range of topics, including the arts (Eames: The Architect and the Painter, The Great Contemporary Art Bubble), the environment (The Island President), food (A Matter of Taste), activism (Pink Ribbons, Inc.), recent South African history (A Common Purpose), reconciliation (One Day After Peace) and sex in Africa (The Sunny Side of Sex -Uganda). More films are being added daily, with the final programme to be announced later this month.
Africa’s most prestigious documentary festival runs from 7-24 June 2012 at Nu Metro V&A Waterfront and The Fugard Theatre in Cape Town and at Nu Metro Hyde Park and The Bioscope in Johannesburg.
Sponsors:
The National Film and Video Foundation is the primary sponsor of Encounters, which is made possible by the further support of The Cape Film Commission, Goethe-Institut, US Consulate General / AFS, The Times, HCI Foundation, Nu Metro, UCT and CTV.
For more information visit www.encounters.co.za.
Watch the trailers:
UNDER AFRICAN SKIES
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPFESqwh0ks
PARADISE LOST 3: PURGATORY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STq7kIDv6R4
PINA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNuQVS7q7-A
MARLEY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ7U_3bJoBk
ANNE FRANK REMEMBERED
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFMnh-n7U7w
DANCING WITH THE DEVIL
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS2mRbgt4cM
BETWEEN HEAVEN & HELL
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXnVY2b0rH0
Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, the first in a gripping documentary trilogy about one of the most shocking and controversial American criminal cases of recent times, will be screened at The Bioscope Independent Cinema in Johannesburg on Wednesday the 25th of April 2012.
Date: Wed 25 April 2012
Time: 7.30 pm
Place: The Bioscope Independent Cinema
286 Fox Street
Maboneng Precinct
Tel: 01 000 70119
Email: info@thebioscope.co.za
Web: www.thebioscope.co.za
In 1993 the mutilated bodies of three eight-year-old boys are discovered in a thicket in West Memphis, Arkansas. The police arrest three local teenagers for the crime and so begins a saga that would unfold with dramatic twists and turns over the next two decades. Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s remarkable Paradise Lost trilogy of documentaries masterfully tells the story.
Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, made in 1996, is the first in the series and has all the ingredients of a crime thriller: a Southern Gothic small town setting, innocent victims and a central suspect who wears black, listens to heavy metal and has changed his name to Damien. Added to this are allegations of satanic rituals, police victimisation and botch-ups, redneck trailer park sensibilities and the death penalty. But this is not a case of a well-constructed piece of crime fiction. It’s raw, spine-chilling and utterly tragic reality.
Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills is a must-see film that will have you bolted to your seat waiting to see what happens next.
The Best of Encounters will screen the second film in the trilogy, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (2000) in May and the final film, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, which was nominated for an Oscar this year, will be part of the 14th Encounters Documentary Festival taking place in Johannesburg and Cape Town from the 7th to the 24th of June.
This is quite likely to be your only opportunity to see all three films on the big screen. Don’t miss it!
Book your tickets online at: www.thebioscope.co.za
This screening is brought to you by Encounters, Africa’s premier documentary film festival and The Bioscope.
Contacts:
Encounters:
Andreas Späth
Tel: 021 465 4686
Email: festival@encounters.co.za
www.encounters.co.za
The Bioscope:
Tel: 01 000 70119
Email: info@thebioscope.co.za
www.thebioscope.co.za
The Paradise Lost trilogy
Directors: Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky
Taken in its entirety – all six and a half hours of it – Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Paradise Lost trilogy represents a remarkable and perhaps unprecedented piece of documentary film making.
For almost two decades, the filmmakers followed the intricacies of one of America’s most gruesome and controversial criminal cases: the brutal 1993 mutilation and murder of three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas and the subsequent trial and conviction of three teenagers.
The story has everything you’d want from a crime thriller: a Southern Gothic small town setting, innocent victims and a central suspect who wears black, listens to heavy metal and has changed his name to Damien. Add to this allegations of satanic rituals, police victimisation and botch-ups, redneck trailer park sensibilities, the death penalty and numerous twists and turns and you’ve got a recipe for keeping audiences riveted to their seats always waiting to see what happens next.
But this is not a case of a well-constructed piece of crime fiction. It’s raw, spine-chilling and utterly tragic reality.
While Paradise Lost: 
The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996), Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (2000) and Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (2011) are all stand-alone feature documentaries and by necessity re-tell parts of the same story, they are rarely repetitive, each introducing new developments and evidence, and each including moments which will have the hair on the back of your neck stand on end.
Over the very long period of time during which these films were shot, the viewer is afforded mesmerising access to the families on both sides, the nightmarish crime scene footage, the courtroom trials, the lawyers and the police investigators. The films themselves have a telling impact on the story and as the years pass, suspicions come and go, major characters evolve and change their points of view, while the lives of the victims’ parents and those convicted of killing them are devastated for ever.
In 2012, the final film in the trilogy, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory received an Oscar nomination, surely at least in part in recognition of the significance of the series as a whole. Watch the trailer here:
No reasonable person would argue that Joseph Kony, the Ugandan warlord who’s been terrorising central Africa for decades, is not a violent and evil man. He and others like him around the world need to be brought to justice and, perhaps even more importantly, the communities they’ve been brutalising need to be allowed to return to peace.
The real question is how both of these objectives can be achieved.
For those of us passionate about documentary films, questions around the efficacy of the genre in highlighting human rights issues have recently been brought into sharp focus by the worldwide publicity about Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) raised by a half-hour-long documentary entitled Kony 2012.
The film, produced by an organisation called Invisible Children and directed by one of its founders, Jason Russell, went viral and has been seen by millions of people around the globe.
If you haven’t seen it yet, watch it here:
KONY 2012 from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.
While Kony 2012 has clearly managed to raise an incredible amount of awareness about Joseph Kony and his nefarious activities, the film has also come in for a considerable amount of criticism, notably from Ugandans who question some of the motivation behind the project.
Undoubtedly there’s more than just a smack of neo-colonialism behind the idea of a US-led initiative purporting to solve a problem in Africa and Ugandans may be excused for being just a little bit sceptical of the effort.
Kony 2012 promotes a single solution to the problem – a military one. The express purpose of the film and the associated awareness campaign is to raise the publicity around the issue to a level at which it will be impossible for the US government to ignore. The intention is to ensure that the US remains committed to keeping American military advisors stationed in Uganda and to having these advisors actively assist the Ugandan army in capturing Kony.
In a world that has seen real-time televised invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, it is perhaps understandable that for young Americans the only viable answer to the atrocities committed by the Joseph Kony’s of this world is military intervention.
But there are other voices, not least of which those of the population living in Kony’s original haunt in northern Uganda. And, as it turns out, there are other documentaries that have attempted to capture the issues involved on film and which have arrived at a much more nuanced portrayal of the realities on the ground.
One of these is Klaartje Quirijns’ Peace vs Justice, which is highly recommended for anyone looking for another depiction of the debate. The film juxtaposes the International Criminal Court’s emphasis on matters of justice and catching Kony with the views expressed by local communities that tend to prioritise peace.
Here’s the trailer:
Peace vs Justice highlights the fact that the most effective measures against the LRA so far have not been military operations, but homegrown radio campaigns encouraging fighters of the guerilla group to put down their weapons and return home. It also points to indigenous methods of conflict resolution and peace initiatives that seem to be ignored by the makers of Kony 2012 and the prosecutors in The Hague.
The debate is set to continue. Let’s hope that world opinion is not simply shaped by a one online film gone viral, but by a plethora of voices including those presented by documentaries like Peace vs Justice.
G-Spotting: A Story of Pleasure and Promise, an intriguing documentary about the mysteries of the “Holy Grail of female sexuality” – the G-Spot – will be screened at The Bioscope Independent Cinema in Johannesburg on Wednesday the 28th of March 2012.
It is almost inconceivable that so many myths still surround female sexual satisfaction decades after the sexual revolution. G-Spotting is a playful and subversive, yet illuminating look at pleasure through science, social revolution and conflicting beliefs.
In 2010 one scientist threw the sexology world into a tizz by suggesting that the mythical G or Gräfenberg Spot is unproven, subjective and does not, in fact, exist at all!
Hailed as the great sexual liberator of women in the early 1980s, the sexually-active world embraced the G, but to many contemporary women the exact location remains elusive. Medical science is still searching for a distinctive anatomical feature and the subject remains steeped in controversy.
So does the G-Spot really exist or is it just a myth? Director Ségolène Hanotaux sets out on a trip around the globe in search of answers.
She visits research centres and fe
male ejaculation seminars, discusses the issue with the woman who ‘discovered’ the G-Spot and hears of intimate experiences from supporters and detractors alike and in so doing tries to establish whether the G-Spot is a physiological organ, the greatest gift to womankind or just wishful thinking.
G-Spotting presents this fascinating topic in a refreshingly frank, utterly entertaining and enlightening fashion that is guaranteed to have you riveted. This one is sure to raise a lively debate, so don’t miss it!
Book your tickets online at: www.thebioscope.co.za
This screening is brought to you by Encounters, Africa’s premier documentary film festival and The Bioscope.
Contacts:
Encounters:
Andreas Späth
Tel: 021 465 4686
Email: festival@encounters.co.za
www.encounters.co.za
The Bioscope:
Tel: 01 000 70119
Email: info@thebioscope.co.za
www.thebioscope.co.za
14th Encounters South African International Documentary Festival
7-24 June 2012
Cape Town / Johannesburg
www.encounters.co.za
About Ecounters:
The National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund (NLDTF) is the primary sponsor of Encounters, which is made possible by the further support of The National Film and Video Foundation , The Cape Film Commission and The Provincial Government of The Western Cape.
Bitter Seeds
Dir: Micha X. Peled
2011 | 87 min | USA
In recent years, documentaries like The Future of Food, Food Inc. and The World According to Monsanto have raised awareness about how our food and other agricultural raw materials are grown these days. In describing how industrialised farming methods and genetically-modified crops controlled by a few powerful multinational companies are taking over the entire agricultural resource chain, these films have painted a grim picture in which small-scale family farmers in the developing world are consistently left holding the shortest straw.
Micha X. Peled’s feature documentary Bitter Seeds adds an important perspective to this picture by highlighting the tragic fate of poor Indian cotton farmers caught up in this latest agricultural revolution.
Promised improved yields and insect-resistant crops requiring less pesticides, the illiterate farmers are convinced to move to genetically-modified cotton seeds, most of them developed by the American biotechnology giant Monsanto. But in many instances things don’t turn out as promised. The new seeds aren’t actually resistant to all bugs and depend heavily on fertilisers and sufficient rainfall.
The high-tech seeds are also much more expensive than traditional seeds and since they do not produce fertile seeds themselves, the farmers have to buy new stock every season. With traditional seeds no longer widely available, many of the farmers quickly find themselves in a vicious debt trap, owing large sums to banks and ruthless money lenders.
For a growing number of Indian family farmers the only way out has been suicide – usually by swallowing insecticide.
Bitter Seeds follows the struggles of Ram Krishna and his family as they battle to keep their heads above water as farmers in India’s cotton belt. Will this season’s cotton harvest get them out of debt or will they lose their three acres of land to the money lender?
Manjusha Amberwar, a young college student who lives in Ram Krishna’s village and has ambitions of becoming a journalist, investigates the reasons behind the rise in farmer suicides. It’s an issue that couldn’t be closer to her heart: her own father was one of the many victims of this tragic epidemic.
While being careful to point out that this is a very complex matter without one single cause, Bitter Seeds gives a voice to those at the very bottom of our modern agricultural system – a system riddled with injustices and headed for disaster. This is a must see film for anyone who is genuinely concerned about the future of sustainable farming.
