SABC DIRECTORS TRAINING ON ROBBEN ISLAND WITH HAILE GERIMA AND MICKEY DUBE 1997 In 1997, while heading SABC training, I initiated a national filmmaker development programme across Durban, Johannesburg, and Cape Town, training around 30 emerging directors. In Cape Town, I selected 10 young filmmakers from diverse communities—including Gugulethu, Khayelitsha, the Cape Flats, and the Southern Suburbs—and took them on a three-week immersive residency on Robben Island.
The group lived and worked on the island, bringing in full production and editing equipment to create a functioning training environment. We used the former warders’ houses as accommodation and one of the island halls as our learning and production space. The setting itself—once home to the incarceration of political prisoners such as Nelson Mandela and Robert Sobukwe—was not symbolic in an abstract sense; it was physically present in everything we did, shaping the rhythm, tone, and emotional weight of the work.
A central part of the residency was the presence of filmmaker Haile Gerima, whose teaching went far beyond craft. He worked with the young directors on storytelling as a form of historical consciousness—urging them to understand cinema as a vessel for memory, resistance, and reclaiming erased narratives. His approach grounded the participants in a deeper responsibility: to see filmmaking not only as expression, but as witness. Being on the island intensified this perspective, as the landscape itself carried the history of political struggle and imprisonment.
We also engaged with the island’s cultural and historical installations, including exhibitions that reflected the lived experiences of political prisoners and, importantly, the families who visited them. One of the most affecting elements was an installation focused on the wives and families of prisoners, documenting their journeys to the island and the emotional and bureaucratic barriers they faced during visits. These encounters highlighted the often invisible layer of struggle carried by families outside the prison walls—those who sustained the movement through endurance, separation, and limited communication.
Each morning, before the day’s training began, we would walk the island in silence. Those walks—often with Haile Gerima—became a form of grounding. The stark beauty of the landscape contrasted with the weight of its history, and it created a reflective space that deeply influenced both the training process and the participants’ understanding of cinema’s role in society.
The residency became more than a training programme; it became a lived encounter with history, memory, and storytelling. It remains one of the most formative experiences in my work in film education and production, shaping my belief in cinema as a tool for cultural memory and transformation. Below is an extract from Haile Gerima time on the Island TO CHANGE REELS By Ntongela Masillela and Isabel Balseiro
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