Dispatch: When They Stop Laughing

I am trying to understand the laughter. What in these disturbing images can be funny? Or if they aren’t funny, then why do they laugh?

I had three screenings of Where Do I Stand? in the last two weeks with over 250 high school students. They all participate in Winter Schools with a group called Ikamva Youth. Different pieces of these screenings moved me, made me happy or optimistic, made me sad, frustrated and deeply concerned, but it is the laughter that I cannot answer for. Is it laughter out of discomfort? Do any of them see themselves in the people looting in the night and dragging a refrigerator down the street?

I always ask. My precursor is to say that as a filmmaker I am curious why people respond they way they do, so I am wondering why they laugh. It’s okay to laugh, I say. The first answer is usually, “It’s the old woman.” The old woman, the woman who we call a “Mama” is holding a box of looted goods and dancing with a big smile on her face. Can I blame them for laughing at this confusing image? It inevitably leads to a discussion about adults, about role models, about what to do and how you feel when you see a grown up doing something you know is wrong. Some students said that in their culture, Xhosa culture, children have to defer to adults and it wouldn’t be appropriate for them to criticize or confront adults on this behavior.

Other things that cause laughter – scenes of looting, a girl saying she thought xenophobia was a disease and that at the time, she enjoyed participating in the looting, familiarity -- a church, a street they know, someone washing his face.

What I do embrace is their responses, be it laughter or oohs and aahs or silence, they are making noise, they are engaged. And as far as I am concerned that is my purpose here.

The discussion after the first screening was like pulling teeth. There were 96 students, many from the high school I profiled in Testing Hope. A few spoke, but I left frustrated. At the end one girl shared a poem she wrote during the discussion – I have included it at the end of this dispatch.

The second screening was in Masiphumelele, the township where Peter, the Rwandan refugee in my film, lives. I started by asking, “What is xenophobia?” One boy replied, “It’s putting someone back where they belong.” “Where they belong?” I asked. “Where they come from,” he replied. Another broke up the words, “phobia is fear,” he said, “and xeno means stranger, so it is fear of strangers.” Here there was the same laughter, but I also noticed a row of boys on the side who watched quiet and wide-eyed, surprised at the noise coming from their peers.

Many kids here connected to Peter and the discussion started with a reflection on their guilt and embarrassment. A sadness that Peter is afraid to walk down the streets of their community. If you run into him on the street, I said, just be nice. When we talked about laughter, the woman who led the group, a White South African, told them that when they were laughing, she was crying. Some students spoke angrily about foreigners being in their community, and the same quiet boy who analyzed the word xenophobia, told them that their fears, their judgments, were wrong.

In the last screening, of about 100 students, it was more difficult to get things started, but once we did, it was difficult to stop. Here, while there was discussion about right and wrong and about guilt, there was also a lot of conversation about foreigners in South Africa. A few people asked, how with so much poverty in their community, they could welcome foreigners and share jobs with them. Another said that Obama and the U.S. and France and other countries have laws about foreigners and immigration, why not South Africa? “What if I went into a hospital and there were no beds because they were all taken by foreigners,” he asked. Then he challenged me, “What would you do if you were President Obama? How would you deal with foreigners and illegal immigration?” Many rejected the violence of attacks, but confirmed an anti-foreigner sentiment, a desire for them to be gone.

There were voices of dissent in the room. “But the foreigners are creative,” said one older boy. “They don’t take our jobs, they create their own jobs, work with their hands, we shouldn’t be jealous.” And another who asked, “Where is our humanity?” “We have been though so much as South Africans, as Black South Africans suffered under apartheid,” he said. “And then we turn on people and do this, where is our humanity?” I latched on to this sentiment and returned to it again and again.

When I lead these discussions, I want kids to participate, I want them to speak and feel free to say anything and not feel judged by me. I don’t want to tell them that their views are wrong or problematic or racist, but I do want to try and change their minds, teach them, pull them into my sphere of thinking. At this moment, in an hour of discussion, and through my film, I may not be able to get them to embrace foreigners in their midst, but if there are going to be attacks again, I can push them to not participate, to talk to friends about what they’ve seen in the film, to choose right – to remember their humanity.

There is talk of a resurgence of attacks starting on July 12, the day after the World Cup ends. I asked every group if they had heard people talking about attacks. They all said yes. One girl said the previous night in her neighborhood a Somali shop was broken into and looted. Another heard someone say that when the foreign tourists leave, all the other foreigners should go with them. Another boy overheard adults on his taxi talking about looting shops and pushing foreigners out. Newspapers have begun to write about the growing possibility of attacks. Some write that government and NGOs are trying to prepare. Others tell stories of foreigners who have been warned by their South African neighbors to leave on July 12. Whatever people are saying, it’s there, the energy is there, the hatred is there, the fear is there and the possibility of more attacks is very real.

All our discussions ended with this question -- if it happens again, where will you be?

We have another screening in Dunoon on Monday. These screenings can’t prevent, but I hope the film can get people thinking. Maybe they leave with a smidgen of doubt in their minds, maybe they question their own prejudices, maybe they’re inspired and tell their neighbors and friends what they saw in the film, maybe they even try to change someone else’s mind. And hopefully, if attacks do happen again, they will remember their humanity.

What’s The Point?

(Written by Zandile Zoya, age 17 from Samora Machel township, after watching Where Do I Stand? )

Because you don’t understand my language

Because you can’t hear what I’m saying

Is destroying my house the only solution?

What is the point of hating me

Because of who I am

What is the point of criticizing me

Because we are both Blacks

What’s the point of neglecting me

Because of my culture

What’s the point of chasing me away

We are all Africans

caring about each other should be our first priority

We are all Blacks

Loving each other and our safety should be our concern

What’s the point of hating each other

Because we are all Africans

The First of 2010

The first dispatch of 2010 and it’s almost June. Some of you know my year started off a bit hectic with an extended stay in the U.S., a long search for an apartment in Cape Town, and a busy time finishing up the film, which ended with a premiere in Hamburg, Germany in the end of April.

So the new documentary is done. It's called Where Do I Stand? I can’t really believe it, almost 2 years of work finished in one afternoon in a post-production studio with a great guy named Andy over a cheese & tomato sandwich. But that’s how these big things often happen, in small moments.

And then I got on a plane to Germany. I don’t think one can prepare oneself for confronting difficult history, but I was hit particularly hard. I was working more than 12-hour days and then all of a sudden I was on a plane. When I remember the trip now, what stays with me more than the three screenings I had were the challenges of being in Germany, the personal history that I was faced with, the memorials to the Holocaust and the incredible vibrancy of the Jewish community. My grandparents – Mark, Sadie, Betty & Henry – were very present.

So whether to write about the screenings or the history first, I wasn’t sure.

I found Berlin such an interesting and beautiful city, so vibrant, with so much history and sadness. I stayed at with my friend Anja and her parents in former East Berlin and was very aware of their deep and difficult post-war history as well. It was at Wansee Villa, a beautiful house with a lush garden on a lake just outside of Berlin where everything hit me. Wansee Villa is the place where Hitler and his cronies met in 1942 to decide the final solution. The event that took place there is in stark contrast to the beauty around.

It is now a museum with an incredibly detailed, and at times relentless, exhibit. I saw anti-Semitic posters and signs from the early Weimar Republic and read very painful, blunt quotes from Nazi leadership about their steadfast mission, like none I had seen or read before. But it was two other things that challenged my heart most. The first was two pictures of a massacre that took place in Czestochowa, Poland. My grandpa Mark (my mom’s father) was from Czestochowa. We never met -- it’s interesting how through stories and pictures we can become so connected to places and people. But when I saw that pile of people in the photograph, I felt instinctively that someone there was my family. A cousin or a cousin of a cousin maybe, or perhaps just a neighbor. But Family.

In the next room was a quote -- I wish now I had written it down but I know if it were in my journal I would reread it with too much sadness. It was just a blunt statement from an SS high up about getting rid of the Jews – surely not a unique statement then. What struck me was not the feeling of hatred but the sentiment of simply not caring – how disposable we were to him. A reminder not of the death toll or the disappearance of vibrant communities, but of how easy it was for these people to make it happen, to kill. And I stood there, alone in a quiet room, and I cried.

Three days later, I took the train to Hamburg and that night was the premiere of Where Do I Stand? as part of filmfest South Africa. There were about 140 people and watching the film in a dark theatre with quality sound and an audience, felt incredible. A professor from Cape Town who now teaches in Hamburg joined me in the Q&A and said he appreciated how the film told the story with objectivity and no agenda and how it illuminated how young people were really asking lots of questions about their own lives and South Africa. One guy in his twenties started his question by saying he was a real left liberal, but added that even he got goose bumps while watching the film. I just paused and took that one in – probably my favorite comment of the night. People asked what the government is or is not doing about xenophobia, how I developed relationships with the students, and one noted how the young perpetrators seemed confused as they grappled with what they did, what they saw and their thoughts now. One girl just said she cried.

I also got negative feedback -- why did I include three middle class kids who say the same thing (I, of course, don’t think they are or they do), where was the black middle class person and where was background about apartheid and South African history, didn’t I think that the well-off kids just helped foreigners because they wanted to help their parents keep their cheap labor. No to the last one, I don’t think these young people are that aware of those dynamics. I think that the violence and the victims were in front of them and that compelled action.

I had the next day to myself so I went down to the harbor. Hamburg was a major port city and thousands of people, including my Papa Henry, emigrated from here to the U.S. and other countries. Henry, unlike most people, was a stow-away and didn’t pay for a ticket. The captain of the ship caught him captain and when they arrived in New York, his uncle met the ship and had to pay the fare. It’s a story I heard a lot as a kid. At the harbor, I asked a tour operator where to find the boat to the emigration museum. He pointed me in the right direction then I turned away and for some reason turned back and smiled at him and said simply, “My grandfather.” He replied, “I hope you see him, in your memories.”

The final piece of my journey was Friday, a screening of Testing Hope for 400 high school students and an evening screening in Cologne where people made connections between the film and attacks against Turkish immigrants in Germany. My time in Cologne was very special. The screening went well and I stayed at the home of Karl and Krista who ran the Film Initiativ. Karl gave me an incredible tour of Cologne the next day and a very honest expression of what happened to the Jews here. He said in the sixties, it was their fight to get his parents and teachers to acknowledge what happened during the Holocaust. People who say they didn’t see were just lying – there were factories in town and a deportation camp just across the river – now a fair trade centre. We visited memorials around the city, to those who he admired and those who were more complicated to celebrate -- a statue of a famous musician and dancer who also danced for Hitler, a square where Hitler used to make speeches that is right next to Cologne’s beautiful and massive cathedral, the brass squares, which I had seen in Berlin, out into the sidewalk, listing the names of people who lived in the building there, when they were deported and where they died. Cologne was so special in part because I was just able to talk so honestly with my generous and kind hosts about the thoughts and feelings swirling in my head and heart.

Thanks for going on this journey with me. I have a feeling that another journey, of sharing this film, is just beginning. But there is one person who shared this and many journeys with me, who is no longer here to read my dispatches, ask me when I am moving back from “Africa,” or tell me her stories. My grandmother. My sister Liza helped me write the film’s dedication:

To Sadie Ruth Kaminski

who understood young people

and listened carefully to them.

1912 - 2010

Dispatch: Riding the Elevator

Some of us have jobs where friends and strangers always say, “Wow, that must be so interesting,” and “what an incredible job,” and just “How cool.” But then for the person, sometimes me, being told that, I just think, well, its work. We all can be consumed by our work. And often in going so deep, immersing ourselves in work, experiencing the stress, we can unwittingly put blinders on. When we’re dashing from meeting to meeting, lobbying for quality childcare and innovations in education, do we always picture those kids and families in our mind? [Just an example, I am sure my parents do.] As journalists seeking the next good story or researchers doing dissertations, once we get back to the newsroom or office to write, do we remember the faces of the people we just interviewed? Sometimes, of course. But it is impossible for that to be always.

I have been filming and watching and cutting footage for the last several months, immersed in whether or not a certain bite makes sense, whether someone will misinterpret someone’s perspective, cutting out the umm’s and aaah’s, picking the perfect shot of Peter brushing his teeth and Vuyani at the mic, and trying how I remain true to all the young people, to the events they discuss, and to myself. But yesterday, as I was going through some archival footage from last May of refugees gathered at police stations and refugee camps, I realized that I had forgotten about the victim. Yes, I have found and filmed Peter, a 17-year-old Rwandan boy, but there were thousands of other victims and casualties of this violence.

It hit me yesterday, watching footage of a woman sitting on blankets in a room at a police station, crowded with other women like her, feeding pap to her son. She was being interviewed and speaking French. I couldn’t understand everything, but what I did understand was: “Nous somme pas vene ici pour mourir, non…. Nous somme des personnes comme vous.” “We did not come here to die, no. We are people like you.” Today, I can still see her face. Her French makes me think she is from DRC. She spoke passionately, her son had wide eyes and remains of food surrounding his lips. While my film only includes one young refugee, this film is about this woman. It is about all the people crowded into this police station. It is about everyone who experienced the attacks, on whatever level.

The tough part of my job lately is to create balance. To balance the story of those who experienced the violence with the stories of the perpetrators, the bystanders and the teenagers who live at a distance, who do not live in the space where the attacks happened, but whose ideas and experiences, to me, are just as important. In speaking about her life, one of these young people, a 16 year old named Carey, said, “Its almost as if we live in this very comfortable bubble and anything that happens outside the bubble really doesn’t matter because we are the most important people in our lives and that’s, you know, how we see things. Which is ridiculous because these attacks happened right outside the bubble.” Pretty insightful for a 16 year old.

So what is my bubble? Do I move in and out of my bubble? I don’t think I live in a bubble – well I like to think I don’t. I don’t know what the correct analogy would be. Perhaps I live in an elevator? Able to go from one place to another, remembering the previous floor I was on, even if I am 10 floors above? Maybe it’s not a great analogy. But I do move from one space to the other, I move from Peter’s lunch of jam sandwiches to my full fridge, from the bed Yamkela shares with her mom and brother to a seat at my favorite café, from filming in the suburbs of Constantia or lying on the beach with friends back to Dunoon or Masiphumelele or Nyanga or Khayelitsha, to lives of people that I know, people that I feel close to, and yet lives that I know I do not know. Can I ever fully know their lives, their challenges and joys? There are boundaries that we create unintentionally, boundaries we choose to put up and boundaries that maybe just are. And yet as I write this I wonder if I am wrong about that last one?

Last Thursday, I got up at 4 a.m., picked up my cameraman Bart at 4:30 and by 5, we were at Peter’s home in Masiphumelele to film his morning routine. Peter came to South Africa in 1994 with his mother and older brother from Rwanda. His father was killed in Rwanda, I don’t know much more of their story. When I asked Peter why they left Rwanda he said because there was a problem between the Hutus and Tutsis, but he wasn’t sure which one his mother was. Today his mother runs a crèche with over 100 children.

Last May, during the xenophobia attacks, Peter and his brother fled to stay with their mother’s friend in a nearby suburb. Their house was robbed, beds, mattresses, clothes, school things, anything you have in your home, just stolen. And until a new shack was built blocking the view, he could see bed through his neighbor’s window. He regularly sees a little girl wearing his 6-year-old cousin’s clothes. “Its actually shocking,” he told me, “cause you think in your mind, what did we do wrong to deserve such pain our lives? What did, where did we go wrong? What did we do to them? For what reason do we deserve this suffering? I ask the same question but no one responds.” He added, “Me myself I don’t think I have an answer for that. I don’t know if I have an answer for that.”

Reflecting on that day, Peter told me he was not ready to die. “I want to die a special way, instead of a violent way,” he said.

The shoot ended with Bart riding partway with Peter and his friend to school, first on a taxi, then on the train. Bart rode only one stop and left Peter to continue on to school. I met him in Kalk Bay and we went for coffee at a lovely café. There we were, at 7:45 a.m. A 10-minute drive from Peter’s life, at 7:45 a.m. surrounded by other people enjoying their morning coffee with a view of the Indian Ocean. So how could we have moved from one space to the other so quickly? We spent a good part of our coffee talking about that. In this country that is often so stratified, where many people never see how others live, we go from one space to the other all the time. Many others don’t – whether from one area or another, whether because of fear or language or race or access, they have difficulty moving between these worlds. But what does that mean for us? I don’t remember all the details of our conversation nor do I have an answer, I’ll just pose the question for now and leave you, perhaps, to help me with an answer.