Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - Sunday 14 April 2002

The little beaded squares and pins that festoon our lapels have become part of the local Aids industry - employment potential! - and while the ribbon might say exactly the opposite of cool la Nike or life in the fun lane with Coca-Cola, it has a certain cachet. In a country where public acknowledgement is squeamish and we live, sicken and die under the dissident gaze of a presidency in denial, just showing you know is cool.

Still, the rhetoric of Aids and the endless politicking around it make it hard to stay emotionally engaged. Which is why the Steps film project - currently screening on SABC1 on Monday nights - is such a timely and imaginative idea.

Thirty-five documentaries ranging from five minutes to 52 (a TV hour), made by Southern African filmmakers old and new, are the harvest of a highly original initiative to make stories about people living with HIV/Aids without preaching us all to sleep.

The project's twin aim is to stimulate the growth of excellent documentary making in Southern Africa. To this end, local directors and editors were assisted by some of the world's most experienced filmmakers, including Ethiopia's Haile Gerima, Finland's Jari Heikkinen and Philip Brooks, the excitable Tasmanian-cum-Parisian filmmaker whose long and passionate relationship with South Africa gave embryonic shape to the Steps idea two years ago.

A total of R20-million was raised by the project's minders, executive producer Iikka Vehkalahti of the Finnish Broadcasting Corporation and South African producer Don Edkins. Typically, various Scandinavian institutions - good old SIDA, the Finnish government - put their money where our mouth is; others followed, including The Open Society Institute of Southern Africa.

Last March a panel of commissioning editors, filmmakers and Aids activists chose 40 of the best proposals . A few dropped out, leaving the 35 now being bought and broadcast by TV networks around the world, including Simunye.

What's great about the Steps documentaries that I've seen so far is their rejection of the cod-liver oil school of worthiness. Aids is a heavy subject and South African documentaries about heavy subjects - thank apartheid for this bad habit - have tended towards the mawkishly sentimental and blackboard monotony . Steps has taken a different route.

Take Kgomotso Matsunyane's Heavy Traffic, about the booming mortuary trade in Soweto. It is a stylish, hard-hitting and extremely moving film that examines the upsurge in Aids-related deaths without ever showing a corpse or even directly referring to Aids more than once or twice. The ages on the coffins - 22, 27, 31 - say it all.

Matsunyane tells the story through the surprisingly appealing folk who make their living trimming caskets, artfully rendering dead bodies "beautiful" and exuding professional dignity behind the wheel of limousine-hearses in the Saturday morning traffic jam outside Avalon cemetery.

At the other end of the Aids life story, stands Jane Lipman's Mother To Child. This gripping film tracks the pregnancies of two young HIV-positive women, building up to the almost unbearable tension of the moment when they - and we - find out whether the virus has been passed on to their babies.

And somewhere in the masala mix of the Steps collection, there is room for 4-minute films like Orlando Mesquita's The Ball, about the adroitness with which little boys in Mozambican villages turn condoms into footballs.

The Steps films are to be translated into several more South African languages for distribution across the country via community organisations and mobile cinemas. Britain's BBC has already screened seven of the Steps films and several countries, including Australia and Canada, have bought all 35.

Steps has achieved something that continues to evade most South African filmmakers: the making of universally appealing films whose point of view is unmistakably African.

Awful as it is, this is our Aids, and we might as well be the ones to tell it, and tell it well.

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