Encounters South African International Documentary Film Festival

The organisers of Encounters South African International Documentary Festival are calling for entries from South African and international filmmakers for the Festival. Due to the extraordinary number of entries Encounters has decided to charge a nominal submission fee of USD15. African filmmakers are exempt.

Awards:

• Audience Award for Best South African Film
• Audience Award for Best International Film

Submit your documentary

Want to submit a film? African or South African documentaries, click here. International documentaries, click here. Be sure to read the Regulations for Submission.

Best regards,
The Encounters Team
Tel: +27 21 465 4686
Fax: +27 21 461 6964

On behalf of the Board – Adv. Dumisa Ntsebeza, Mandisa Zitha, Dr. Susan Levine, Dr. Ciraj Rassool, Nodi Murphy and Steven Markovitz – Encounters is pleased to announce the appointment of Darryl Els as the Director of the Documentary Festival.

Encounters recently advertised the vacancy and received some 32 applications for the post.

“We were most encouraged by the calibre of the applicants,” said Co-Founder Nodi Murphy. “It demonstrates that there is a healthy interest in the Festival and the genre.”

“Encounters is well established but we believe that Darryl will take the Festival to new heights,” said Co-Founder Steven Markovitz.

Els is no stranger to curating film programmes and developing audiences as he is a founding member of the successful independent Johannesburg cinema, The Bioscope. A Wits graduate, he has worked in documentary production and as a researcher with a specific interest in South African cinema history. He has curated and presented programmes at various institutions and film festivals most recently as part of the Visionary Archive project in Berlin.

“Encounters has played an important role in developing my own knowledge and love of documentary film. I am delighted to be joining such a long running institution”, said Els.

Encounters, established in 1999, is the pre-eminent documentary festival in Africa and takes place annually in June in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Screening the best of African and international documentaries, Encounters hosts Master Classes, producers workshops, pitching forums and has commissioned over 50 documentaries.

Key Festival funders have included the National Film & Video Foundation, the Bertha Foundation, Al Jazeera and the National Lotteries Commission.

Best South African Film: The Shore Break

Directed by Ryley Grunenwald, The Shore Break is the disturbing story of two Pondo cousins on opposing sides of the Xolobeni Wild Coast mining conflict.

Australian mining company MRC Ltd and their BEE partners Xolco want to mine for titanium, while the South African government is pushing forwards with a plan to create a N2 Toll Road through the Wild Coast.

But as The Mail and Guardian asked in their review, “Why should Australian mining interests be allowed to despoil pristine Wild Coast dunes and the communities attached to the land?”

Many in the local community want to rather preserve their traditional Pondo lifestyle, with eco-tourism seen as an alternative route to economic growth. Many are also worried about disturbing the graves of their relatives.

But opposition comes at a price: some who speak up have allegedly been assassinated, while the late Pondo king was dethroned by government and replaced by a pro-mining relative.

The Shore Break sold out shows, had extra screenings added in Cape Town and Johannesburg, and sparked numerous conversations.

“It is incredibly rewarding that The Shore Break has been so well received by South African audiences,” says Ryley. “Though the film is busy being shown around the world, it is the local audience who truly understands all the layers, nuances and the gravity of the story – because the Wild Coast is part of our lives and part of our natural heritage as South Africans. The screenings at Encounters have been fantastic and we’re really grateful to the festival and the audiences for making years of hard work well worth it.”

The Backsberg Audience Choice Award is the second festival prize for The Shore Break, which was also named Best Documentary at the 2015 International Environmental Film Festival (FIFE) in Paris.

The Mail and Guardian hailed it as “eloquent, persuasive, forcible: advocacy documentary-making at its ethical best,” while City Press called it both “alarming” and “inspiring.”

Watch and embed the trailer at https://vimeo.com/102621491.

Read more about the film at http://theshorebreakmovie.com/ and sign the petition to stop forced mining on the Wild Coast at https://secure.avaaz.org/en/petition/Investors_of_Mineral_commodities_LTD_MRC_Stop_forced_mining_on_South_Africas_Wild_Coast/?ctCmtjb.

Best International Film: Virunga

Directed by Orlando van Einsiedel, Virunga is an eco-thriller set in the DRC’s national park, a World Heritage Site that is home to the world’s last mountain gorillas.

Only two days before the film’s world premiere, park warden Emmanuel de Merode was gunned down after delivered damning evidence that Virunga is in grave danger.

With the Congo’s fragile peace crumbling, the park and its gorillas are under threat not just from the rebel army but also from a corrupt mining company that has found oil there.

The Backsberg Audience Choice Award is just the latest for Virunga, which has won over 20 international prizes and was nominated for the Oscar.

Watch and embed the trailer at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxXf2Vxj_EU.

For more information, visit http://virungamovie.com/.

Festival overview

Audiences voted Nomakhomazi Dyosopu’s Ndi Vumeni: Faniswa the second most popular South African film, followed by Lebogang Rasethaba’s Prisoner 467/64. Ndi Vumeni: Faniswa screened with Jas Boude, directed by Georgina Warner and Imraan Christian.

Virunga’s fellow Oscar nominee, Wim Wenders’ The Salt of the Earth, was voted the second favourite international documentary, followed by Joshua Oppenheimer’s multi-award-winning The Look of Silence.

The 17th Encounters South African International Documentary Festival held 85 screenings in June, made possible through the support of the National Film and Video Foundation South Africa, Al Jazeera, Bertha Foundation, WESGRO, HCI Foundation, What’s On and Big Fish School of Digital Filmmaking.

Festival programmer Jenna Bass says, “Congratulations to both The Shore Break and Virunga on their well-deserved wins. Having an African-set documentary win the Backsberg Audience Choice Award for Best International Film can only be indicative of South Africans’ growing interest in the rest of our continent. We are equally proud that the three most popular South Africa films were made by young filmmakers with fresh voices, engaging with activism of both the present and the past, in what we hope is a new era of transformative South African filmmaking.”

Backsberg Estate Cellars CEO Simon Back adds, “It is a great honour for us to sponsor the Audience Choice Awards. The aim of the awards is to raise awareness around the festival and what has resonated with audiences. With sustainability being core to the way we run our winery, I am also thrilled that both winners raise awareness around critical environmental matters.”

DIRECTOR: Michel K. Zongo | Burkina Faso / France / Germany / Qatar | 2015 | 89min

African cloth, woven by Africans, worn by Africans. This was one of Thomas Sankara’s dreams fulfilled upon the opening of Faso Fani, the factory that would make Koudougou the textile capital of Burkina Faso. Just over a decade later, Faso Fani stood abandoned, yet another casualty of the World Bank and IMF’s programme of shock therapy. Director Zongo, grew up enthralled by this ‘jewel of a factory’, which endowed its employees with refrigerators, mopeds and hard-earned national pride. Armed with a videocamera, he retraces Faso Fani’s legend, rising beyond his role as documentarian to challenge Faso Fani’s old workforce to rejoin and use their expertise once more, to bring them profitability and independence.

DIRECTORS: Jasmina Metwaly & Philip Rizk | Egypt | 2015 | 72min

On a roof-top overlooking the Cairo metropolis is an unusual theatre where a group of working-class men rehearse and stage confrontations, stories from everyday life. Police brutality, fabricated charges and exploitation all come under the unforgiving glare of the spotlight. Dissent is brewing in a newly privatised factory, and the manager – played here by a worker – plots how to cling to his control and profits, setting his security guards against his workers, calling in favours from a minister. Slipping between roles and characters, fact and fiction, between the blurred lines, is the truth – not just of factory life, nor solely of Egyptian issues – but a global social struggle against rampant capitalism, a systematised dispensability of human beings, felt just as harshly across our continent, and our world.

DIRECTOR: Brett Morgan | USA | 2015 | 132min

Ghostly, electric, this biography to end all biographies is like the man himself: a blurred whirlwind of sound, image, memory, pain and legend. Rewind to small-town Abderdeen, where Cobain spent his childhood, rejected and unmanageable, nurturing a creative flame-turned-firestorm which became rock sensation, Nirvana. Titled after an early audio collage, Montage of Heck mashes interview, animation, audio, live footage and diary entries into a scrapbook in four dimensions. But its beating heart is inscribed onto the never-seen-before VHS home movies of the young Cobain family – Kurt, his wife Courtney Love, and daughter Frances – which reveal not just an artist cracking under the responsibility of being a doomed prophet, but a man chasing a dream of happiness he couldn’t believe in.

Festival Appearances

Sundance, Berlinale

Screenings at Encounters 2015

CT: Fri 5 9pm CN V&A | Fri 12 8.45pm CN V&A | Sun 14 8pm Labia
Jozi: Sat 6 8pm CN Rosebank | Wed 10 8.30pm CN Rosebank | Sun 14 5pm CN Rosebank

DIRECTOR: Adriaan De La Rey & J.P. Kotzé | South Africa | 2014 | 76min

In the ‘burial tomb’ which is today’s Pretoria, the buildings of architect Norman Eaton are time machines to another world: a forgotten city of elegance and refinement in the heart of apartheid. The subtle grandeur, harmony of line and space, as well as Eaton’s signature, exquisitely detailed patterning can still be seen in his best known structures, from suburban houses designed for Pierneef and Alexis Preller, to the Netherlands Bank, the UNISA Kleinteater and Polly’s Arcade in Central Pretoria – some of which are neglected and crumbling, yet others have passed into obscurity, overtaken by the vicissitudes of modern tastes. Eaton the man remains somewhat of an enigma, but in this documentary tribute friends, critics and fellow-architects gather to pick through his legacy, finding a place for his memory in contemporary South Africa.

Screenings at Encounters 2015

CT: Mon 8 6.30pm Labia
Jozi: Wed 10 6.30pm Bio

DIRECTOR: Mehran Tamadon | Iran/France | 2014 | 105min

After three years, atheist Iranian expat Mehran Tamadon has done it: he’s convinced four Muslim clerics, defenders of Iran’s Islamic Republic, to spend a weekend living under one roof in the hope of brainstorming a way for all Iranians to co-exist, regardless of belief. As the clerics arrive for the mother of all sleepovers, the stage is set for a gripping experiment, a war of words as Tamadon pitches his liberal convictions against dogma, realising that the boundaries between them are hard to define. Debating issues from women’s rights to music and freedom of speech, this is an epic cat and mouse game laced with poison, fascinating entertainment and the sober reminder that mankind is destined to find conflict amongst itself, no matter how advanced it believes it is.

DIRECTOR: Hamza Ouni | Tunisia| 2013 | 88min

If Holden Caulfield was Tunisian and had a best friend, his story may be like that of Khairi and Mohamed; a foul-mouthed curse in the black night of post-Arab Spring disillusionment. A pre-dawn bang on the door and the two friends are off to work, loading bales of hay onto trucks crisscrossing the countryside. It’s a job they abhor almost as much as their country. They’d much rather curse the Revolution, get drunk in caves, terrorise pedestrians from the back of scooters, look for sex and dream of escaping Tunisia to become drug dealers in Italy. And all the while watch the best years of their lives slip away. The Revolution has come and gone, but so what? “This is Tunis. This is our fucking life.”