Miners Shot Down
DIRECTOR: Rehad Desai COUNTRY: South Africa YEAR: 2014 LANGUAGE(S): English, Xhosa, Zulu SUBTITLES: German RUNNING TIME: 86 min
SECTION: International Forum 2015
SYNOPSIS
In August 2012, miners at South Africa’s biggest platinum mine in Marikana, went on strike for higher wages. Six days later, 34 strikers had been killed – by the police which was supposedly acting in self-defense. Rehad Desai’s captivating investigative documentary shows a radically different picture of the developments which changed South Africa for ever.
Many saw the pictures of the bloodbath on television in 2012: A group of men armed with spears storm towards police, who then open fire. It seems like a clear example of self-defense. MINERS SHOT DOWN also begins with these news images. However, Desai then alters the perspective because he was with the strikers from the very beginning. He combines his original material of the strike and the escalation of the conflict with the TV images and unfolds a very different reality, exposing a shocking scandal: It was not violent mineworkers but the unholy alliance of a ruling party, a powerful trade union and a multinational corporation that were responsible for the first large-scale massacre since the end of Apartheid.
REHAD DESAI
Rehad Desai spent 20 years in exile until he could return to his homeland South Africa in 1990. He has been working in the TV and Film Industry since 1997. At the moment he is managing his own production company in Johannesburg, where he also founded the Human Rights Film Festival TriContinental. He is an activist and the speaker of the Marikana Support Campaign.
FILMOGRAPHY
Born Into Struggle (2004), The Bushman’s Secrets (2006), Miners Shot Down (2014)
SCRIPT: Anita Khanna, Rehad Desai PRODUCERS: Anita Khanna, Rehad Desai CAMERA: Nicolaas Hofmeyr, Shadley Lombard, Jonathan Kovel EDITORS: Steen Johannessen, Menno Boerema, Kerryn Assaizky, Reuben van der Hammen, Megan Gill
PRODUCTION: UHURU PRODUCTIONS WORLD SALES: Ina Rossow, Deckert Distribution