‘Surfing Soweto’ was screened at the South African Embassy in London last night. Here are some thoughts on the storytelling.
A bit about the film first. It’s a film-length documentary, about 90 minutes. We follow the lives of three young men from Soweto, largely through footage they’ve collected themselves, over three years. Sara has taught them how to use the cameras and they come and borrow the cameras from her and return them.
Running throughout the film is the recurrent theme of the the trainsurfing, on top, on the sides, and under the trains that run between Soweto and Johannesburg. It’s an addiction, and the boys themselves are aware of this.
Although it’s the focus of the story, it’s really the lens through which other stories are being told, the most compelling of which is that of a generation where absent fathers mean that it’s almost impossible to become a man. Then just offstage is the quieter seed of hope that places like the Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre in Sophiatown are playing in giving some of these young men a way to take on their lives and make something of them.
I can’t possibly do the film or Sara’s film-making justice here, and am not really paying attention to the big story here. But here are a few notes about the process that seem to me to hold clues to other kinds of storytelling that wants both to convey and to start to change the story. Mostly obvious, so I’ll be brief.
- It started life as a 24 minute current affairs piece. It was only because of this that the three young men had the confidence, Sara thinks, that she would represent them accurately: without the current affairs piece trailing ahead, the film could not have been made.
- She did only two days filming of the surfing itself, although it is spliced through the film. For the rest of the three years, she had a contract with each young man that they would not use her cameras to film surfing.
- The film was made largely by them and ‘assembled’ (her word) by her. She held true to the belief that they needed to see themselves in this story. This has been evidenced by their relationship with the film. It crackles with almost unbearable authenticity. The relationship with addiction extends to drugs and alcohol, and the rawness with which we see this, and the family structures that struggle to hold together, is extraordinary.
- It doesn’t attempt to tidy up the contradictions, or push a point of view, even though backed by the Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre (they are very much offstage, not even in the story at all really). It allows the layers of story, and the central themes, to emerge through the telling.
The train surfing itself is compelling, lyrical, poetic, unbearably on the edge. The young men themselves are compelling, lyrical, poetic and unbearably on the edge too. It’s a film I’d really recommend seeing, for itself, for the way it tells a huge story in an immediate way, for its integrity, and for it as a lens on the way storymaking can shift stories.
victoriaward
