Events
Encounters Film Festival @ Bertha House
This week, between Thursday 17 June & Saturday 19 June, we are proud to be partnering with The Encounters Film Festival to co-host a series of activist films.
Mutant – Thursday 17 June, 6pm
On Thursday evening, youth from the Cape Flats will be joining us to watch ‘Mutant’. This dense but carefully paced film provides an impressionistic portrait of hip-hop juggernaut Isaac Mutant – a member of Dookoom and Koloured Ass Krooks and an MC in his own right – and the Cape Flats community he lives in.. In its exploration of the local community, Mutant also investigates the usually whitewashed history of the Cape-Coloured identity, including its roots in the Indian-Ocean slave trade as well as in the local Khoisan and Griqua communities. Beautifully crafted, the film is textured with the day-to-day life of the local community, revealing fragments of beauty set against the profoundly inhumane town planning of the Cape Flats.
I, Mary – Friday 18 June, 6pm
On Friday, activists from occupations around Cape Town will be watching I, Mary as a way to catalyse discussions around gender and GBV that have been dominated within their contexts. I, Mary takes an in-depth and highly intimate look at the experience of albinism through the eyes of Maryregina Ndlovu, an activist who has made it her personal mission to make albinism more visible in society and the media. By giving Mary the space to talk freely about her experiences, from her early memories as a child, to the liberation of reclaiming herself and her body as an adult, the film helps to normalise albinism while also exploring the intersection of albinism and gender-based violence and its impact on personal identity.
There Is Power in the Collar – Saturday 19 June, 2pm
On Saturday, constituents from queer organisations will be engaging with the film There is Power in the Collar. This emotionally powerful and politically important film looks at the largely unexplored intersection of Christianity, colonialism and homophobia in Africa, and specifically in Botswana, where it follows a queer human-rights organisation’s fight to decriminalize same-sex relations in the country’s constitution. While colonialism and Christian evangelism have been key factors in the spread of homophobia in Africa, the film also acknowledges the potential power of the church, and pastors in particular (hence the film’s title), to reverse the tide on homophobia, expressing the brotherly love of the new testament rather than the controlling and archaic laws of the old. Although There Is Power in the Collar documents the situation specifically in Botswana, its central concerns apply to much of Africa and indeed the world.
To watch any of these films on line please go to www.encounters.co.za (ticket prices on their website)
