How to make a film in a language you don't speak

I thought I should write one last blog, mainly because the previous one isn't a nice place to end, with its description of the shooting I witnessed.

No need for an update on that business - I'm fine and feel really comfortable, and I visited the site of the incident a few times before I left South Africa, and had no odd feelings.

I'll finish my 2009-10 trip blogs with a brief account of the film I made with Justice and Women in the final week of my internship in Kwa-Zulu Natal. You can see it here or at the bottom of the entry.

Yanguye High School is plagued by violence, and it has become a pretty bad environment for learning and feeling safe. So JAW's plan was to allow youth to speak on film about their thoughts about what is happening at the school, and what they see as the sources of the violence, and what can be done about it.

We wanted a fair representation of different types of students, not just the types who would normally volunteer to come to a workshop about violence at school, so we set up a little role play where our youth team acted out a scenario. A boy and a girl are attacked by another guy who throws a rock at the boy. What does the boy do? Students were asked to write their name and put it in box A, B or C based on their likely response: fighting, walking away or reporting it to a teacher. Then we selected an equal number of students randomly from each of the three boxes to be part of our workshop, the final stage of which was interviews with some students one on one.

One of the students randomly selected was a student who, days before, had been expelled by a traditional council for threatening to shoot the principal. He was allowed back to school, and features at the end of the film.

The workshop was run entirely in Zulu, and I technically was the lead facilitator without knowing what was being said. But it worked, somehow, and we got footage out of it, which I then got translation help with. And some lovely songs as well. It was then a case of quickly editing it together before the internship was over.

One issue was that I wanted to get kids to speak outdoors, in front of the hills and houses of Yanguye, but I didn't realise the camera microphone couldn't handle the wind. As a result, some interviews can't be heard but they have been 'double-subtitled' in both English and Zulu.

As for some concluding remarks about the 3.5 month trip, I learned an awful lot, and I was challenged an awful lot, with all sorts of things I've gone into in earlier entries. I went into the internships sure that I wanted a career in aid and development work. Now I'm not so sure, having learned about how it actually works and the realities of the industry. Coupled with a renewed passion in filmmaking, I doubt that I will be following the aid career path in 2011, and I may well decide to study film.

The journey of working out what I actually like and what I want to do isn't finished (and it never will, I'm guessing), but I think I took a few big steps over the summer, and will look back on the trip as a difficult one but a profoundly important one in my self-formation.

Here's the film: