We watched this movie earlier tonight at the Hillbrow Theatre together will many of the actors who were co-opted into it. The movie's euro-centric, colonialist, one-sided and racist view of Hillbrow left us feeling extremely angry and betrayed. The European film directors had come to South Africa, done very little research, chosen our community and put together a 30 minute selection of 10 fictional stories about Hillbrow. All of the stories were negative and exclusively portrayed Hillbrow as a place of violence, crime and desperation, and all violence in the movie was committed by black people. It is not as if Hillbrow does not contain some of these elements, but to portray it as exclusively a place of despair and brokenness is extremely problematic. It reinforces dehumanizing world views about the urban poor, Hillbrow, inner city areas, South Africa and even Africa. Living in this community we often see actions implemented by those in power here that are abusive and unjust. These violations of dignity are tolerated because the urban poor are seen as a collective and in a negative light. Worldviews that do not show signs of hope, spirituality, resilience and beauty in places like these form the foundation for excusing human rights violations and are what makes this film so offensive. To make matters worse it was evident that many of the actors (who had been co-opted from Hillbrow) were angry about the way they had been portrayed. It seemed evident that they felt used by the directors. We are not sure what actions should be taken by our community to fully express our disgust and concern at the filmmakers desire to show this movie around the world.
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