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more... - Cultural Calendar
POV "Promised Land"
POV "Promised Land"
Wed, 02/01/2012 - 8:00pm
Captures multiple perspectives of citizens struggling to create just solutions to land disputes — South Africa’s “ticking time bomb.”
POV "Promised Land" airs Wednesday, February 1 at 8 p.m. on WXXI World (DT21.2/cable 524).
Though apartheid ended in South Africa in 1994, economic injustices between blacks and whites remain unresolved. As revealed in this incisive documentary, the most potentially explosive issue is land redistribution. The film follows two black communities as they struggle to reclaim land from white owners, some of whom have lived there for generations. Amid rising tensions and wavering government policies, the land issue remains South Africa’s “ticking time bomb,” with far-reaching consequences for all sides. “Promised Land” captures multiple perspectives of citizens struggling to create just solutions. By Yoruba Richen.
The award-winning POV (a cinema term for “point of view”) series is the longest-running showcase on television to feature the work of America’s best contemporary-issue independent filmmakers.
Audiences:
Ke Nako - Now is the time. 19 June 2010.
Perhaps many of the viewers of Promised Land , the film, will have seen Avatar. In Promised Land you will see Avatar applied in Africa, specifically in South Africa.
It is called colonialism and it starts with taking the land from the indigenous peoples. Its results still dominate in South Africa as they do across Africa, the Americas,Asia and Australia and many other islands and nations.
On the 19th June 1913 The Natives' Land Act declared that 93% of the land of South Africa could only be owned by white men. Next Saturday is the 97th anniversary of that Act, the defining act of what was later to be declared a crime against humanity - Apartheid.
It is also in the middle of the FIFA Soccer World Cup. The global media will record the state of the nation of South Africa on that day. Perhaps you will understand the events in this country on that day when you have watched Promised Land.
The ' ticking time bomb' you refer to was primed and set on 19th June 1913. Surely the neo-colonial state, strengthened by our failed land reform, will not still be in place on the centenary of that fateful day. Land reform has failed in SA as it did in Zimbabwe, Kenya, and many nations of Africa.
Ke Nako is the official slogan of the World Cup. It may prove to be prophetic for radical transformation in this land. That means a radical alternative to land reform. That can only come from the landless masses, not from neo-liberal government.
If it doesn't come now the 19th of June 2013 will be hell.