Africa is a Country

The Second Annual Soweto 360 Festival that commemorates the 1976 student uprising in the township south of Johannesburg, takes place this Sunday in Brooklyn. A highlight is definitely director Rico Rico Speight’s film “Where are they now?” which focuses on a group of new South African youths.

Here’s a blurb I wrote for the film’s website:

“What is it to be, in the words of Donny Hathaway, “young, gifted and black” in South Africa in the wake of that country’s first democratic elections? How about in New York at the dawn of the Giuliani era? In “Where are they now?” director Rico Speight follows 16 young black people in the two locales — the one of seeming hope, the other with its full-scale assault on New York City’s poor and blacks. Then he revisited them one decade later. What he came up with is a sensitive and surprising portrayal of these young people and the circumstances of their lives. Edited in staccato style and overlaid with an excellent hip hop soundtrack, the film conveys the excitement and urgency in both settings. At the same time, Speight manages to keep a firm hand on proceedings. The film — without sensationalizing or resorting to clichés — shows how over time the South African youths agonize about their new freedoms even as they  take advantage of them (simultanously embarking on new careers, dealing with tragedy and fretting about identity, among other things). They also display a healthy cynicism about the limitations of liberal democracy.  Their North American counterparts, equally, are aware of both the opportunity and limitations of life in the late twentieth century and the early part of the new century against the backdrop of increased globalization and deindustrialization.  On both sides, displaying the tenacity of those who know oppression and exclusion, the young people manage to believe.”