The Smithian

“This is not your dad’s HBO Mandela film…”

…forceful coming-of-age story set circa 1989, against the backdrop of the violent beginning of apartheid’s end, Otelo Burning examines different paths to freedom—finding it in moments of escape, fighting others for it—and the significant costs inherent in each approach.

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Mamphela Ramphele, a respected veteran of the struggle against apartheid, announced on Monday that she had formed a new political party to challenge the governing African National Congress, calling on South Africans to “join me on a journey to build the country of our dreams.” The party will be called Agang, meaning “build,” said Dr. Ramphele, a physician who became an anti-apartheid activist…The new party is the latest in a string of challengers to the dominance of the A.N.C., which has won every national election since apartheid ended in 1994 but has come under increasing scrutiny over charges of corruption and poor governance. In addition, inequality has grown in South Africa since the end of apartheid…

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…Dramatic moments are captured in shifting perspectives; a whites-only beach is seen through a wide-angle lens, while faces behind bars and faces beaming in final victory are masterfully portrayed in close-up. A beautifully designed book that will resonate with children and the adults who wisely share it with them.

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…add Otelo Burning…to the canon of moving films about apartheid, though the main characters start as “just kids” more interested in swimming than guns. Seen from the angle of black South African teenage boys, it presents political movements as they are for most of us as we live through them; sometimes only in retrospect do you realize the importance of what seems to be going on in the margins.

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…the history of oppression and resistance in South Africa through some five hundred pictures, films, magazines, and related ephemera. It’s a terrible, engrossing story—from the marches to the massacres to the triumph of Nelson Mandela…

more [exhibit at NYC’s International Center of Photography].

…Drum’s…portrayals of black urban life, arts, politics and culture were revolutionary. Some of those images will be part of a major exhibition that opens at the International Center of Photography this month called “Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life.” “It was dangerous and difficult work,” Schadeberg says, recalling how the secret police kept the magazine under surveillance. “What we tried to show was how unjust apartheid was.”

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…while these…individuals, all musicians and artists, try to combat the negative, lasting impact of the apartheid, the film’s tone remains…hopeful…

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…the film takes a look at the history of the local punk scene, from the first multiracial punk bands that formed at the time of the Soweto uprising and the militant anti-apartheid hardcore and post-punk bands of the 1980s to the rise of celebratory African-inspired ska bands that sprang up from Cape Town to Maputo in the fresh democratic era of the 1990s.

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the tale begins to take off, and to venture into incompletely charted territory, in Smith’s account of Mandela’s deepening political commitment. The memories of ANC activists such as Ruth Mompati, Fatima Meer, and Ahmed Kathrada vividly recreate the clandestine excitement, the exhilarating multiracialism, and the physical risks of anti-apartheid activism in the 1950s and early 1960s.

iNeed. more, here.