The Morality of Filming South African Vineyards

Yeah, that’s was an honest and decent film and I think it was this incredible experience
that I live on the line farming in the ways some cape of South African sort of live with
the wine farm workers you are and ethnically colored which is the separate ethic category
in the South African or black or white but historically that the scene itself the and the
latest days so board of by the Dutch and the local quiet sand and traditionally their boys
work on the wine farms and have had kind of paternalistic relationship with the wine
farm owners where they were and sort of you know, you did it own your own houses or
land or were often pay it in wine. Honestly the huge problems of alcoholism. So for me
going in there it was the beginning I think of my disillusion actually with the crisis of
using film as a research tool.

I'm not saying I wouldn’t do it again that I would be very, very up going into a
community as a white South African with the video camera and clearly from a different
class. I sort of turning back on this wine farms initially and the farmer hadn’t told the
workers that I would be filming and I just seem he does the permission and he sort said I
will she’s going to be filming you to the next three months of your lives. So you know
over time then you build the relationships with this people and so thus it does become an
incredibly important experience in your life but I think it also was quite disturbing
because no matter how good your intensions are and that power ambones never goes
away and if you’re not very careful I think it’s very damaging.

I think it’s the sense that I wouldn’t want to either film in the community again that I felt
couldn’t say and know to me. And just the history of South Africa is still too recent and
since this sort of paternalistic and labor relation system ended for me to really feel like
this work as in the community and had in that same sense of urgency to feel that they
could tell me at certain moments. And so it was a constant sort of I was trying to read it
but you know often I felt and that I was actually overstepping boundaries and they didn’t
feel like they have the right to maintain those boundaries. I think if I did work on a film
project again I would pick a community that was more similar I would say class and
particularly class background so that you felt that they will always and co-participants in
your project.

Maybe not, yeah, maybe I wouldn’t and there's always the argument doesn’t confront to
us people and need the voice and they have voices the silent as it is and that anything that
can give them a voice but again the effects of doing that I'm not sure how it works. And
actually think it’s a new generation in South Africa of black middle class that is emerging
at the moment. I think that’s going to be a very interesting generation to watch artistically
and I think they will be able to create art that is indigenous in the way that perhaps can
sides that some of those ethical issues.