This year is the 12th Encounters International Documentary Festival. This festival has grown every year, probably due to the fact that they always show great documentaries from South Africa, Africa and around the world.
This year is no different and there are some which tie in very well with Slow Food principles. Below is a teaser for three documentaries which we feel would be particularly relevant, but there are many more excellent documentaries on the schedule so feel free to go and read through it on their website.
The festival runs from the 12th to the 29th of August 2010. Some of the screenings are at the Nu Metro at the V&A Waterfront and others are at the Labia on Orange Street.
Dirt! The Movie
DIRS: Bill Benenson, Gene Rosow / USA
2009 / 85min / Narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis
Don’t be confused. English English also has a word for the “living, breathing skin”, unique to this planet, that has a negative connotation. Soil. But this is a positive film that traces the formation of ‘dirt’ over the millennia, how it has shaped us (at every burial we are reminded that we are dust) and how it features in many cultures’ folktales. Of course it is the very substance that sustains us – providing food, shelter, implements, warmth, even giving our wines their distinctive tastes if experts are to be believed. It’s humorous and engaging tone makes more palatable the caveat that, even in our deceptively environmentally-conscious world, this common or garden stuff matters as much as the air that we breathe, and gives examples of diverse, exciting and innovative projects where people are getting their hands dirty… and enjoying it. Courtesy of Woolworths
For the Best AND FOR the Onion!
DIR: Sani Elhadj Magori / Niger / France/ 2008 / 52min
Filmed in Galmi, Niger, this lingering and thoughtful film trims one of the most universally significant, and often most financially excessive, rites of passage to a bittersweet elemental level. For the Best and For the Onion charts the travails of Yaro, a hard man and an onion farmer, as he fights the elements, decreasing onion prices and competing farmers to finally provide his daughter Salamatou with nuptials that she and tradition deserve. Salamatou’s wedding teeters over the success of Yaro’s famous Galmi purple onion crop. Revelatory, succinct and simply told, the documentary follows Yaro and his labourers as they prepare the fields, transplant the seedlings, negotiate with the in-laws-to-be, sing the water in, seek advice, haggle over prices and bring in the harvest to ensure that his betrothed daughter doesn’t spend one more year as an embarrassed spinster.
Tapped
DIR: Stephanie Soechtig / USA / 2009 / 75min
Water, water everywhere, but at what a price to drink! This instantly gripping, well-researched documentary investigates the many negative health and environmental issues that surround the commercialisation of H2O. The director looks at diverse and troubling elements of the industry, charting the water’s course from its source, where the systematic plunder of free water for vast profit for international companies is at the ongoing detriment of entire communities, to the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans and the terrifying reality of vast plastic bottle continents. In between are many worrying factors, environmental damage, unfettered and unregulated profits, contaminated so-called ‘pure’ water, and the human and planetary suffering that comes with the manufacture of easy-to-toss plastic bottles. Plunging into the well of deceit and misinformation about water, the film is sobering and thought provoking.
August 4, 2010
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