Opening her debates to millions

150703. Prince Albert. Prince Albert hosts the Indie Karoo Film Festival also known as the IKFF, which runs from the 3rd - 5th July. Short films and full length features are on show. They take place at The Showroom theatre, Jans Rautenbach Schouwburg and the Sunshine Cinema. Dr Siona O’Connel, creater of ‘Coloured’ and ‘Movie Snaps’, along with DOP, Adile Cook, speak about the films. Reporter Fran. Pic COURTNEY AFRICA

150703. Prince Albert. Prince Albert hosts the Indie Karoo Film Festival also known as the IKFF, which runs from the 3rd - 5th July. Short films and full length features are on show. They take place at The Showroom theatre, Jans Rautenbach Schouwburg and the Sunshine Cinema. Dr Siona O’Connel, creater of ‘Coloured’ and ‘Movie Snaps’, along with DOP, Adile Cook, speak about the films. Reporter Fran. Pic COURTNEY AFRICA

Published Jul 7, 2015

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Francesca Villette

A CAPE Town academic plans to take her passion for encouraging constructive debate about oppression, race and gender discrimination and make it accessible to millions.

Siona O’Connell, a senior archive curator at the Centre for Curating the Archive and a lecturer at UCT, had two documentaries screened at the Indie Karoo Film Festival in Prince Albert at the weekend, where 50 independent film-makers showcased their work to industry roleplayers and an audience of about 450 people.

Due to popular demand and her desire to remind people about their history, O’Connell will next month submit both documentaries, including a third which would be completed soon, to the SABC.

Libraries across the city have also signed up to screen O’Connell’s documentaries to thousands of pupils and their parents.

The first to showcase at the Festival at the weekend was O’Connell’s Movie Snaps, a documentary that features photographs and installations taken by the Movie Snaps photographic studio, which was based in a building on the edge of the Grand Parade.

Thousands of pictures of women and men were taken by photographers from the early 1940s to the late 1970s.

The documentary features photographs that speak about Jewish settlement in South Africa, and the annihilation and fragmentation of lives through legislated apartheid laws from 1948 onwards.

An exhibition of the photographs first took place at the District Six Homecoming Centre in January.

Since then, the Central Library, Cape Town has featured O’Connell’s exhibition, which will also be showcased at libraries across the city this month.

“I am interested in the sophisticated cinema-goer, but it is to the grandchildren of people who were forcibly removed and who now live on the Cape Flats, and are shaped by a history of which they had no part, that I want to speak,” O’Connell said.

The second film to feature was Coloured, which examined the lives of South Africans living in “the shadows”.

O’Connell, her director of photography Adile Cook and editor Andrea Shaw sketched a story of “inbetweenity” among the Miss Gay Western Cape and Spring Queen, as well as coloured people living in the province.

“There was a moment in 1994 when we imagined a future that is very different to the one that we are experiencing now. When I stand at UCT and I see Manenberg, Bonteheuwel and Mitchells Plain, even though it is 12 minutes from the CBD, it could well be a different universe,” O’Connell said.

Coloured will also show at the SA-UK Seasons creative programme in London in two weeks’ time.

The third movie, which would be completed at the end of this month, titled An Impossible Return,will look at forced removals during apartheid.

A total of 110 movies were submitted for showcasing at the festival, of which 50 were selected.

The films were spread across four categories: full-length features, documentaries, short films and experimental films.

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