Celebrating these local screenings of international documentary films — What's not to love?

Daily Maverick

18-06-2025

For ten days the Encounters International South African Documentary Festival brings to Cape Town and Johannesburg audiences a major selection of documentary films from around the globe. Running from 19-29 June 2025, the programme reflects the issues of now, through a smorgasbord of films that will get your endorphins going. You may even fall in love.
On the subject of love, let's talk about sex. Sex in books. Scandalous books by Edna O'Brien. Her first novel in 1960 was credited with breaking the silence on sexual matters and social issues during a repressive period in Ireland after the Second World War. The book was banned and denounced from the pulpit. The film, The Blue Road, captures how O'Brien makes her own way in the world towards a bold life.
Love and war have been an odd pair since the phrase 'make love not war' was coined.
This year, the 'war' films craftily look at what else happens during times of war. In Mr Nobody against Putin, a brave teacher ostensibly follows Putin's orders to re-educate Russian pupils about the war against Ukraine while putting his own life in danger.
In Khartoum, refugees fleeing from Sudan reclaim their stories of survival through powerful reenactment and multimedia expression, and the war story is rendered an artistic story told through character on green screens.
In Intercepted, the audience eavesdrops on calls from Russian soldiers made from the battlefields in Ukraine.
And in Yalla Parkour, Gaza gets a different gaze, through the eyes of a young parkour athlete.
In Abo Zaabal 89, a son revisits the emotional weight of his parents' resistance in Egypt and the scars left by state brutality and silence. This is creative storytelling at its best.
The master crafter of documentaries, Wim Wenders, brings the monumental works of artist Anselm Kiefer to the 3-D screen in Anselm, allowing the viewers to be present in Kiefer's prodigious studio where the 80-year-old artist continues to create visceral works. Kiefer is one of the most important artists of the last 50 years, building and breaking concrete, burning straw and liquifying lead. Sometimes he uses lead for his book sculptures. Derived from his interests in mythology, history and knowledge, Kiefer often uses books as subject matter representing knowledge and learning.
At least five of the programmed documentaries are about different ways of encountering learning and gaining knowledge: Mothers of Chibok; Fitting In; Shadow Scholars; Brief Tender Light; and How to Build a Library.
Incidentally, O'Brien's last novel, Girl, was a fictional account of a victim of the 2014 Chibok kidnapping in Nigeria. The mothers in the titular Mothers of Chibok were shattered by the kidnapping of their daughters by Boko Haram, a group resolutely against western education, yet their determination to put their other children through school was not broken. These mothers are so steadfast about the importance of education as a possible escape from poverty, that they work almost unworkable fields with crude hand tools for cash to pay school fees.
The layers of complexity for students to study outside their home countries is explored in Brief Tender Light. The filmmaker follows five students from different African countries while they study at MIT in the US (someone, please buy a ticket for President Trump — he may just learn a thing or two about foreign students at American universities.)
Shadow Scholars turns on its head (please buy President Trump a ticket to this film too!) the awful trope of the 'stupid' African student and the 'bright' American student, with the laying open of an established business practice of unemployed graduates in Kenya writing papers, essays and dissertations for students at American universities. Yet, embedded in this thriving business, which sees the Kenyans receive a payment for their intellectual labour while the American students graduate with degrees not laboured for, are many layers of dishonesty, deceit and duplicitous ethics.
How to Build a Library is a beautiful film, which positions the main Nairobi public library as a place for learning about the country's colonial past, while exploring new opportunities for Kenyan graduates on home soil. And closer to home is Fitting In, a year in the life of the House Committee at Eendrag, a men's residence at Stellenbosch University. How these young men deal with the past to forge a future for all, is a film worth seeing.
Our collective future is dependent on climate change, how we understand it and what we do about it. Three exquisitely made films draw a line from the past to climate change now, to climate change in the far future.
The Tree of Authenticity is poetically constructed around records of centuries of environmental destruction found in a research centre in the Congo Basin, letting the trees talk for themselves.
In Yintah, which means 'territory', the battle is for the sprawling Wet'suwet'en territory — its land, forests and water — which has never been ceded by the indigenous people, against the Canadian government and fossil-fuel companies intent on building a pipeline across it.
In Shifting Baselines, rendered in evocative black and white, Elon Musk's phallic 50-story rockets shoot up or explode. The only difference is where they leave their junk — in the surrounding environment, or in LEO (low Earth orbit) in the sky, beyond the clouds and further than the eye can see. What Musk is selling is a utopian lie of leaving all the mess behind, but the space junk is already in the sky.
If your love is jazz, Misty: The Erroll Garner Story delivers a lyrical tribute to this self-taught jazz pianist, using a myriad of preserved archives and rare recordings.
If history and photography is your love language, get your tickets for Sam Nzima: A Journey Through His Lens, about the impact of Nzima's 1976 image of Hector Pieterson on the world, and on Nzima's own life.
In The Brink of Dreams, which won the Golden Eye prize for documentaries at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, a group of Egyptian teenage girls tackle societal restrictions by taking their theatre troupe to the streets of the town.
If for you love means standing up for your own power, don't miss Union, which in intimate cinema verité style follows an unlikely group of warehouse workers as they battle for recognition of their union by Amazon, in the face of the anti-union tactics of the behemoth and its baron boss, Jeff Bezos.
From 19 to 29 June, Encounters Documentary Festival packs in 60 films over 10 days, but with one screening per film, tickets sell out fast. Get yours now and be part of the conversation. DM
For a programme of films and screening dates, go here. Book tickets here.
Participating screening venues: The Labia, Ster Kinekor V&A, Bertha Movie House, The Bioscope and Ster Kinekor Rosebank.