Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg) - October 5, 2001

It doesn't surprise, but it certainly amazes me that there is no outcry at the carnage being wreaked on the African population by a disease that has been left to spiral out of control. How many jumbo jets full of passengers, how many World Trade Centre office blocks worth of people have died and are dying of Aids in Southern Africa? And where is the coalition of world leaders and wealthy nations gathering to unleash a response to this monster?

A winter afternoon in July 2001 and I find myself in Phiri, Soweto, where Dumisane Pakhati is filming an animated discussion between a group of men in the backyard of a house. Next door a child makes circles in the dust on his bicycle while his mother hangs out washing to dry. Her neighbours are talking about masturbation.

One of the guys says: "You know what? Women must just masturbate with their hands, they mustn't go with vibrators because they go buy extra large vibrators and you got a small willie and you go in there and you think you the man and the woman is like - what? and you're thinking - I'm the man, but the real man is in the wardrobe and he's battery operated!"

Pakhati cuts, he's laughing too much to hold the camera steady. "This is amazing!" he shouts. "I've never heard men, black or white, talking like this." Pakhati is one of 30 Southern African filmmakers commissioned to make documentaries for what is probably the largest international television co-production ever. Each documentary looks at people living with HIV/Aids. The project, called Actually, life is beautiful, is the brainchild of Cape Town producer Don Edkins under the umbrella of Steps (Social Transformation and Empowerment Projects). It is a response to two problems facing the region; the dearth of opportunities for our filmmakers and the crisis of HIV/Aids.

Edkins began last April with nothing but passion and determination. "I put up a banner and started marching."

Funders quickly fell in step behind him and are still joining the project as it mushrooms towards broadcast week around World Aids Day in December.

First to sign up was the Soros International Film Fund, quickly followed by Iikka Vehkalahti, commissioning editor at YLA2, a Finnish television station. Since then more than 20 broadcasters have come on board. Edkins and Vehkalahti reel off the list: BBC, Belgium's RTBF, Scandinavia, two Canadian broadcasters, Ireland, Austria, Switzerland, Holland, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, SABC, Mozambique, Namibia, Zimbabwe. They smile as they lose count - "a lot," says Edkins. "We found out that the most local stories are also the most international because they touch something very deep in the human intellect and heart. Real films that can travel internationally and are provoking your mind regionally."

Although there are many cooks in this project, they seem only to be enriching the broth. The local filmmakers I interviewed speak highly of the valuable input they have received from their committee of producers, particularly Vehkalahti, Edkins and Nic Fraser of the BBC.

The budget includes funds for seven local-language versions of the films and a distribution programme.

"We're working with organisations and schools, universities, HIV support groups, and we'll bring these films to as many people as possible using Don's mobile cinemas."

There are 30 professional helpers from around the world working three or four weeks at a time with directors and crews. "It's a university of the filmmakers for the people," says Vehkalahti. Many of the crews include HIV counsellors "so that we don't exploit the people in this situation".

All income from the films will be ploughed back into Steps and allocated to new projects, training and distribution. It's a unique opportunity for Southern Africans to work internationally.

In the few years Pakhati's been working in television he has won Avanti awards and much acclaim for his work. "My biggest problem was that I didn't want to do an Aids film. I wanted to do a story about people, not about an issue, you know?

"The first image in the film is me watching archive material of [Hendrik] Verwoerd making a speech about separate development. I turn to the camera and I say I told my friend how I intended opening the film and he said to me why do you guys always talk about the past? The past is the past. And I laughed. That's all I could do. My friend says your film is not about apartheid, it's about your street and Aids and how Aids is killing black people and I continued to laugh, because he's right and so am I. It's about both.

"My film is a love letter from me to the street, to my street, expressing my love, my hate, my pain, my disgust, my hope, you know, like a love letter is. But mostly it's a film about relationships, about how everything connects. Nothing exists as an island. Unemployment is not an island, Aids is not an island. Everything is interconnected."

That's how Pakhati came to be interviewing his neighbour, Muzi, who tested positive for HIV in 1989. "When I speak to others they say we don't believe you have HIV, you seem to be healthy. I say no, you must know more about it, just fight it. Say to yourselves you are warriors; if you kill me I'm going to kill you. So I tell myself that - if it's coming to kill me, I'm going to kill it." Nic Hofmeyr was at Sithengi, the South African film festival held in Cape Town, when Steps was launched. "The whole European documentary world seemed to be focused on this project, so of course I wanted to be a part of it," he says. Hofmeyr is co-directing A Miner's Tale with Mozambican Gabriel Mondlane. Hofmeyr is well known as a director of photography and more recently as director of the much-celebrated Main Reef Road.

The miner of their tale is Joaquin, a winch operator in his late 40s who has worked on the Reef most of his life, though he comes from a village in Mozambique, north of Xai Xai. Two years ago Joaquin tested HIV positive.

"He's had a lot of sexual partners, he obviously likes the ladies. Anyway, we followed him on his first trip home in four years. There he sees his wife and child and people who don't know what his status is and don't know that much about HIV and we observe him dealing with telling, or not telling, people about his health. It's a seriously difficult ethical position for a filmmaker to be in. We know something that his wife and family don't know, so we had to talk about that before he left and he said to us you know this is the way I'll behave when I see my wife, I'll take precautions, I'll use a condom."

So what happened?

Hofmeyr smiles. "Go see the film and you'll find out."

On the day the US was attacked I was at a truck stop in Moatize, Mozambique. The Beira Corridor, once known as the Corridor of the Future, is now called the Corridor of Death because of the dizzying rate of HIV transmission along the route. Photographer Guy Tillim and I were invited by Steps to visit the set of a film by Maputo-based Licinio Azevedo. It's about the prostitutes who service the truckers along the road. I was sipping beer with the band of women and children (most are under 16 years) I'd come to know over the week and they were talking about how poverty had driven them to this work.

Suddenly Azevedo was running towards us, raving about plane crashes in New York and Washington. We shook our heads, the heat had gone to his brain. But as he repeated the news and drew the crew to the bakkie to hear the radio reports, it began to sink in. For the girls, who were all dressed up and ready for the night's filming, the destruction of buildings in some distant city meant nothing. They sat drinking milk stout and smoking, bewildered at the suddenness with which all attention had veered from them. We left, too distracted to film.

That was fine with the girls, they could go back to work.

We drove back to Tete in silence, staring at the juggernauts that rumbled past us down the blacktop, towards their night stop and the girls who would sleep with them for $1,50 protected, $3 without a condom.
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