Rehad Desai is well-known for his hard-hitting documentaries on South Africa's hot button issues, including Miners Shot Down about the Marikana massacre and the recently released How to Steal a Country.
But the obvious choice from his company Uhuru Productions' prolific catalogue for IOL's Youth Day Mini Film Festival was Everything Must Fall, a look at the #FeesMustFall student movement that burst onto the South African political landscape in 2015.
The film will be available on the IOL website and our YouTube channel for free for the 24 hours of Youth Day, as part of our specially curated line-up of documentaries and features about youth activism and issues in South Africa.
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In response to our request for a free screening of the movie the filmmakers said: "South African students’ demand for free, quality, decolonised education as a basic right continues to be an issue that is unresolved today. It echoes the call for equal health care, the right to food, water and housing that is so lacking in our society. The film raises issues of police brutality, used to protect a status quo that is becoming untenable. The students’ Rhodes Must Fall Movement tore down statues celebrating colonial conquest. In all of these things, the film loudly echoes the Black Lives Matter Movement and we offer this free screening in solidarity and in the hope that we are finally seeing the worldwide dismantling of a world order built on the backs of, and sustained by, oppression."
Everything Must Fall follows the experiences of Wits student leaders Mcebo Dlamini who was arrested and charged with serious offences, Shaeera Kalla who was shot 13 times with rubber bullets and others, as well as Wits University Vice Chancellor Adam Habib.
The film came under fire for its focus on Wits when the #FeesMustFall battle had raged on higher education campuses across the country.
When Everything Must Fall won the Best South African Documentary at the Cape Town International Film Market and Festival 2018, Desai said in his acceptance speech: "This is a film that needs to be seen. We firmly believe in the dictum: a film is only completed in its viewing. And in this instance we want this film to be used by people to discuss it, to debate it, to disagree with it, to critique it, to help inspire more narratives. This is not the definitive film, this is just one element, one slice of the life of this incredible movement that was birthed in 2015."
Engage with Desai and
https://www.facebook.com/Everythingmustfall/ and https://twitter.com/uhurudigitalza #EverythingMustFall
To find out where Everything Must Fall will be screened next, subscribe to Uhuru Digital's YouTube channel.
* Along with Everything Must Fall, IOL's Youth Day Film Festival's selection includes Professor Siona O’Connell’s documentary The Wynberg 7: An Intolerable Amnesia about a group of high school students imprisoned in the 80s, Weaam Williams’award-winning film Hip Hop Revolution; Nadine Cloete’s powerful and heartbreaking short film Miseducation; artist Haroon Gunn-Salie's site-specific work Zonnebloem renamed; the story of Keletso, a young geologist, who is passionate about the protection of the beautiful environment she grew up in, Sifiso Khanyile's unique look at June 16, 1976 entitled UPRIZE! and more.
Watch along with us this Youth Day as we pause and watch your rise.