“While WOS cannot claim every achievement by women (in SA), many of them are to its credit.”
Former minister of Arts and Culture Dr. Palo Jordan
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Film Selection
A COUNTRY FOR MY DAUGHTER
A film about women, violence and the law Year: 2010 In what seems to be a hard and unwinnable battle against sexual violence in South Africa, A Country For My Daughter showcases some landmark legal victories and offers hope. Nonkosi Khumalo, Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) chairperson, senior researcher at Section 27. Nana’s mother, who herself experienced domestic violence once, revisits the stories, places, and where possible, the women, to find out how personal experiences of horrific trauma have begun to change the way the law against rape is prosecuted in South Africa. AN INTERSECTION
Year: 2010 An intimate portrayal of two HIV positive people who decide to have a child. The risks, the worries, the practical details - Intersection is remarkable for its calm, elegant honesty and abiding gentleness. By turns intense, heart breaking, touching as well as funny (a great first nappy moment) Intersection demands a wide audience. AFRICA SHAFTED: UNDER ONE ROOF
Located in Johannesburg, Ponte, the tallest residential building in Africa, houses more than 4000 people, many of them refugees and migrants who have travelled from every corner of the continent in pursuit of a better life. Africa Shafted poignantly captures the opinions of these ordinary, diverse individuals, humanising them and affording an honest glimpse into their lives. CALLING THE GHOSTS
An extraordinarily powerful documentary, about two women caught in a war where rape was as much an everyday weapon as bullets or bombs. Jadranka Cigelj and Nusreta Sivac, childhood friends and lawyers, enjoyed the lives of in Bosnia-Herzegovina until one day former neighbours became tormentors. Taken to the notorious Serb concentration camp of Omarska, the two women, like other Muslim and Croat women there, were systematically tortured and humiliated by their Serb captors. Once released, the pair turns their personal struggle for survival into a larger fight for justice by aiding other women similarly brutalized and by successfully lobbying to have rape included in the international lexicon of war crimes by the UN Tribunal at The Hague. *Emmy award winner CHINA’S STOLEN CHILDREN
Ten years after the policy-changing and award-winning film, The Dying Rooms, the same team returns to a very different China where the infamous One Child Policy has had the horrific side effect of a boom in stolen children. With extraordinary access to devastated parents desperately searching for their stolen son; a man who brokers the deals and has sold his own offspring; and prospective parents grappling with giving up their soon-to-be-born daughter through lack of options, we are brought face to face with the crisis that such a stringent government policy has created among China's poorest people. Beautiful, haunting, deeply tragic, but impossible to ignore, this film takes us into the heart of modern China. A place where girl babies are being sold for 3,000-4,000 RMB (£200-270); Tens of thousands of children are now kidnapped and traded on the black market whilst the State is more concerned with keeping the story quiet than tracing China’s stolen children. CONGO IN FOUR ACTS :::: LADIES IN WAITIN
In a run-down maternity hospital, a ward of women who have recently had their babies wait to be allowed to leave. The problem? They cannot pay the hospital fees. A long-suffering manager must negotiate collateral with them so they will return and pay in full. The film eloquently exposes both the squalid hospital system and the endemic poverty of Congo without, pointing fingers, leaving that instead to the viewer. FOR OUR LAND
Prod. Brian Tilley Year:2008 Through her Green Belt Movement, Wangari Maathai - environmental activist, social justice advocate and Nobel Peace Prize recipient - planted 30 million trees in Kenya while protecting existing forests endangered by development. A veritable force of nature herself, Maathai communicates her infectious fervour as she advocates environmental action and government reform in this documentary.
MEN FROM ATLANTIS
Dir. Jo Higgs Year: 2009 Determined to shift their reputation as a community of rapists, drug dealers and lost causes, twelve ordinary guys from Atlantis, near Cape Town, decide to take a stand. We follow them as they 'carry a woman in their hands' in an unprecedented attempt to change hearts and minds in the fight against abuse. Will their efforts change anything at all?
THE WITCHES OF GAMBAGA
Year: 2010 A haunting film about a community of women condemned to live as witches in Northern Ghana. Made over the course of 5 years, this disturbing expose is the product of a collaboration between members of the 100 strong community of 'witches', local women's movement activists and feminist researchers, united by their interest in ending abusive practices and improving women's lives in Africa. Painful experience and insight combine to generate a uniquely intimate record of the lives of women ostracized from their communities. ATROPHY (THE FEAR OF FADING)
Picture, poetry, voice and music are woven together into a contemplative short film about the lingering memory of youth, the loss of spontaneity and the quiet fear of growing up. THEMBI
Effervescent, beautiful, confident, brave, eloquent and ambitious, Thembi epitomises the youth of South Africa. Thembi came to fame through her audio diary for the US’ National Public Radio documenting her daily life in Khayelitsha and the physical, social and emotional struggle of living with HIV. Her humour, forthright nature and inner strength enchanted her 50 million strong audience, forcing people far and wide, humble and famous, to listen to her sound logic as the voice of a generation that South Africa’s politicians had forsaken. WELL BODI BIZNES
In 2009 Sierra Leone President Bai Koroma announced to the UN that his country would deliver free health care to mothers and children under five by April 2010. Examining the reality of putting his policy into practice is at the core of Redelinghuys and O’ Donoghue’s powerful fly-on-the-wall film, which is shot during a Mother and Child Healthcare week. The film tracks the stories of the only gyneacologist in the region and a nurse as they attempt to rise above the ambivalence to deliver the services desperately needed by mothers. Beautifully shot and sensitively edited, Wellbodi Biznes doesn’t take sides or point fingers, but rather underlines the bitter struggle in Sierra Leone to lower the astonishingly high mortality rates of both mothers and infants. THE DEAD SEA - SENGADAL
An engaging film about the lives of Tamil fishermen and the difficulties they faced during the Sri Lankan war. The film tells the stories of real victims on both sides of the conflict - living and dead - highlighting the human rights violations which occurred and documenting the fishermen’s rage against the violent atrocities perpetrated by both the Sri Lankan and Indian governments. Incorporating stories recounted by widows of fishermen killed by the Sri Lankan navy, the film’s blend of fiction and documentary is a powerful protest against the injustices and ethnic cleansings which continue to take place around the world. UMOJA: NO MEN ALLOWED
Some years back, approximately 600 Samburu women claimed that British soldiers had raped them. When the women returned home, they were beaten and cast-out by their husbands and ostracised by the community. Umoja: No Men Allowed tells the amusing and moving story of a group of impoverished tribal women in Northern Kenya who oppose age-old patriarchy when they set up a women-only village. VISAGES DE FEMMES/WOMEN'S FACES
At a festival, a chorus of women sing and dance as two stories unfold. In a village, a young women with a jealous husband gives him something to be jealous about when his younger brother comes for a visit. When her husband threatens her, she learns self-defense, but her troubles may not be over. In a coastal city, Mrs. Congas runs a fish-drying business. She wants a less smelly job, so she seeks a loan to open a restaurant. When she's turned down, two of her daughters visit the banker and bat their eyes; the loan comes through. But her troubles aren't over: every male relative and tribal cousin shows up, praising her lazy husband and expecting money, food, and help. |
Film Festival 2011 |
Dir. Karin Slater
Dir. Ingrid Martens
A film about rape, war and women
Prod. Kate Blewett &Brian Woods
Two films from a quartet of powerful, hard-hitting short films that lay bare the disturbing reality of everyday life in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Dir. Yaba Badoe
Dir. Palesa Shongwe
Dir. Joe Menell
Dir. Kyle O' Donoghue, Miki Redelinghuys
Dir. Leena Manimekalai, 
Dir. Elizabeth Tadic.
Dir. Désiré Ecaré