This year's festival reached new heights and continued to grow audiences for compelling cinema from the global South focusing on pressing human rights issues.
Worthy of particular mention this year were the screenings of nine short films completed over a two month period in the run up the festival's opening in the mid-August, under the banner, ‘Filmmakers Against Racism', commissioned by the Human Rights Media Trust examining the appalling xenophobic attacks that marred the South African landscape in May this year.
These short films explored the motivation and social context behind these attacks, the lives of foreign nationals in the aftermath of these attacks, particularly under extremely harsh conditions in temporary refugee camps, the challenges of reintegration, and the inadequate response of public officials.
Each year the Tri Continental Film Festival runs an audience award for recognition of the festival's outstanding film, outstanding South African film and outstanding short film. The 2008 Tri Continental Film Festival audience award for best film goes to Mick Davie's The Choir. Filmed over six years, this inspirational documentary follows the life of young fellow Jabulani Shabangu as he joins the Leeuwkop prison choir thus beginning his journey towards self-redemption and eventual release from prison.
In the category best South African film, the audience award this year goes to Tapologo, a South African and Spanish co-production directed by Gabriela and Sally Gutierrez Dewar which explores the impact of South Africa's mining boom on the labour camps that support the industry and the often brutal realities facing woman in these communities. Freedom Park squatter camp, situated in the Northwest province, accommodates a migrant workforce that mines the world's single largest source of platinum, and the women in the community service the needs of the male miners as a means of basic survival. A group of HIV-infected former sex-workers have created a network called Tapologo and have learnt to be home based care-workers transforming degradation into solidarity and hope. This rare film provides a humanising and honest lens to the courageous work of community activists working under desperate conditions.
In the category of best short film, audiences chose Okepne Ojang, Kyle O'Donoghue and Miki Redlinghuys' humorous and compelling, Congo My Foot. Created as part of the Filmmakers Against Racism series, this 24 minute piece tells the story of Tino La Musica, a Congolese band based in Cape Town that is displaced and evicted from their homes at the time of the xenophobic attacks this past May. As narrated by Ojang, an immigrant to South Africa from Cameroon, the film shows the trauma facing foreign nations as they seek to piece their lives together and find future direction in the fall out of the xenophobic attacks. Tino La Musica's uplifting rhythms and ultimate reunion provide an inspiration backdrop to the ethnic tensions that continue to simmer throughout the nation.
Cooperating partners included The Human Rights Media Trust, Lawyers for Human Rights, SACOD, The Mail and Guardian, Cinema Nouveau Screened by Fish Eagle, Breakthrough, Out of Frame, Out in Africa Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and Encounters SA International Documentary Festival. Additional partnerships and sponsors included: the National Film and Video Foundation, SABC, Gauteng Film Office, Timberland, MNET, The Swedish Embassy, The Italian Cultural Institute, The Mexican Embassy and Spectrum Visual Networks.
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