After countless hours behind the lens and the odd all-nighter in the cutting room, the Rhodes final-year television journalism students have finally submitted their major documentary assignments for the year.
After countless hours behind the lens and the odd all-nighter in the cutting room, the Rhodes final-year television journalism students have finally submitted their major documentary assignments for the year.
Always a sell-out when put on for the public, this year’s films are expected to continue that tradition with their highly localised topics and diverse array of interpretations on an experimental theme.
Paul Hills, of the Rhodes University journalism department, runs the annual documentary project and challenged his students with a novel focus this year.
“I asked them to look through the lens of research,” he said, “and to include a counterpart journal article that accompanies the documentary.”
This, he went on, taught the students to absorb the information and understand it more thoroughly.
It certainly asked the film-makers to deepen their involvement in their stories and acquire an understanding not always captured while peering through a camera.
Hills also explained that the 24-minute format of the documentaries is a real challenge for students, and is usually not attempted until later in one’s career. Based on what he’s viewed thus far, he believed the experiment has worked.
Among the issues explored by the films are some keystone problems facing Grahamstown and its surrounds. For example, Anything but the Bucket examines the notorious bucket system in operation in many poorer areas of Makana, while considering more suitable sanitation alternatives and why they aren’t used more widely.
Crew member Andy Leve points out sub-stories within this, such as “the ostracism faced by those who collect the buckets every morning,” as well as more hopeful case studies of innovative systems that are successful.
However, a more subtle social comment is made in The Population Placation. In what Hills described as an “enormously feel-good piece,” cameras followed four local schoolchildren through a typical day in their vastly different lives.
From breakfast in the township to family dinners in the suburbs, the film makes use of quiet moments with characters to display just what divergent lives local youngsters live, despite their geographic closeness.
As team member Rogan Kerr explains, the goal of the film was not to make conclusions but, “just to put things out there,” leaving viewers to contemplate how resources, peers and family dynamics shape the development of children.
Other powerful themes probed include the hopelessness felt by much of Grahamstown’s coloured community, the widespread replacement of traditional diets with foreign ones, and lineages of traditional leaders in the Eastern Cape.
Hills described his charges as doing “amazingly well” and said that they came through a “cliff-face of learning” and that he felt a genuine sense of pride in what they’ve achieved.
Public display of the documentaries is planned for October, and organisers are hoping to use either the Rhodes Theatre or the 1820 Settlers' Monument.
