Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon…

Our first official festival event was a film called Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon, written and directed by Khalo Matabane. The movie was hybrid of fictional drama and documentary. Kenilwa, a struggling South African writer, meets Fatima, a Somalian refugee in a park one Sunday afternoon. She begins to tell him the story of her life in Somalia and the horror of watching her family’s murder before being shot and left for dead. She disappears after that conversation and he spends the rest of the film searching Johannesburg for Fatima from Somalia, so that his can write her life story. On his path he and his videographer ask random people on the streets of JoBurg if they know this Fatima from Somalia with the blue silk hijab. On his journey he asks the real strangers he meets on the street if they are South African and in the process collects the stories of so many South African Immigrants. Most share the same story, South Africa was the safe haven as they escaped war torn countries and exile. From Somalia to the DRC, Zimbabwe to Yugoslavia, Palestine to Bosnia, the film tracks the migration of Africans, Asians, and Eastern Europeans to South Africa. It also explores the major immigration problems in SA as well as the extreme Xenophobia. I would highly recommend this stunning short, simple film. Look for it on netflix or at you local indie film store, it was officially released in South Africa in 2005.

Perhaps the most surprising realization (though it makes sense) is that on the continent, South Africa is the new world. Even during the time of apartheid, South Africa was considered the land of milk and honey compared to surrounding counties mired by civil war. It was also particularly moving that even those immigrants who’ve been South African citizens for two and three decades consider themselves to be refugees from there real home. There was an almost universal sentiment in the film that South Africa, no matter how many opportunities it offers, feels like a distant foreign land. It left a heavy imprint on my mind about America. Like America this is a country built on immigration, and like America the xenophobia is reaching epidemic heights. There is the ridiculous sentiment in the USA that the “mysterious they” are stealing our jobs, weighing down our welfare system, and overtaxing our schools. The historical reality is that immigrants have taken on the hardest, dirtiest labor, for less money than any “American” would take. They are working, many tax paying, people looking for same opportunities every American’s ancestors eventually found. The issues surrounding our overtaxed educational system are much larger than the immigration problem. Denial allows us to maintain the status quo and pretend that we have fulfilled the promise of Brown vs. The board of education, while the technology and information gap continues to grow for the majority of our youth. Towards the end of the movie, Kenilwa is at a prison which housing illegal immigrants awaiting deportation. The prisoners began to chant and sing a song that roughly translates to “You are wasting your time. We will be back. We will come back again.”

My overriding question is who gets to decide which people deserve a chance for a safe, prosperous life? Who decided there aren’t enough opportunities, land, and freedom to go around?