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Review Mar 15 2011 | »
Border Farm at the South London Gallery Two reviews of the SLG's screening of the Thenjiwe Nkosi's docudrama on a group of Zimbabwean "border jumpers"

Nadège Druzkowski

On January 28th, the South London Gallery screened Border Farm (2010), a 30 minute film by South African artist Thenjiwe Nkosi. It was the fourth event of Contemporary Africa On Screen, a year-long programme of screenings, discussions and workshops centred on film and video by African artists.

Two excerpts of Thenjiwe Nkosi's previous work, the Elephant King and Journey to Darfur, a project where the artist recorded views of Darfurian refugees on issues of peace, justice and reconciliation, introduced Nkosi's new film. It put into context her main concerns revolving around the idea of belonging.

Border Farm is a docudrama about a group of Zimbabwean 'border jumpers' who make their way across the Limpopo River to seek work on farms in the far north of South Africa. Nkosi worked with twenty five 'volunteer' migrant farm workers living on the border. The movie is part of a larger multimedia project conceived and coordinated by Nkosi, which offered the group the opportunity to speak about their experiences of border jumping through photography, writing, performance and film.

The movie raises interesting questions : are these people crossing the river for economic, political reasons? What will they find on the other side? How are they going to integrate and find their place across the border? The movie revisits a place, much talked about recently with the contested reelection of President Mugabe, from another perspective. In that respect, it answers what is for me the artist's role in society : interrogate, give a slightly different view on current issues and surroundings.

However, my two main concerns are about the genre chosen for the movie and the targeted audience. Border Farm is a docudrama. The participants wrote the script, played the parts while Nkosi had the final word in the editing process. It shows in the somewhat amateur scenes. The crossing of the river did not convey a real sense of danger. The stories played and told by the group lose some of their power as they do not refer to a more direct personal experience. As regards the audience, Nkosi answered, in a Q&A session at the end of the screening, that it was mainly done for them. It has now been shown on South African TV and screened in a gallery space. I believe the film would have been stronger if the team involved had more clearly defined what they wanted to show and to whom.

The movie is nonetheless well worth seeing and more info on the project can be found on their blog here.

Flo Wales Bonner

In Border Farm's precursory material a huge deal is made of 'belonging', an issue apparently central to filmmaker Thenjiwe Nkosi, America-born child of exiled family, who returned to her ancestral home in 1992.

Apt theme for a film that does not seem to belong to any genre. First, Border Farm is a documentary; 'I don't have a passport. I don't have anything' admits a handsome Zimbabwean face, caught in a mug shot, 'It was my hope of good things', says another.

From documentary, the film quickly becomes something else: the documentary of a play, undeniably Midsummer Night's Dream-ish in parts, as the Dulibadzimu Theatre Group squabble over the script that they've written to commemorate their crossing of the Limpopo River, fight over lines, laugh, shout, dance around their sun-baked auditorium.

A group of men sit crouched on the earth, a pile of money at the centre of their human circle. Another man stands over them, tall, dark, angry brows. He shouts something and I am disorientated; it takes me a while to realise that I am now seeing the play itself. Leaps like this keep me at arm's length throughout, not sure of a way in.

The film's chop-changing identity (Documentary? Documentary of play? Play?) places emptiness at its heart. As the workers rehearse their play, I see that the river of their nightmares is, now, a dusty strip of land that they pretend to struggle across. This negative space is, like a memory, like the film, a fevered attempt to resurrect something that has passed - but like a memory, it brings with it a tremendous sense of loss.

Where we might hope for the play itself to replenish something, one audience member confesses, after the film, that she was hoping for more 'drama' - their raging river, re-enacted, is placid, their journey under the barbed wire at the border clumsy, tame. The sense of something missing is felt stronger than before.

At the beginning of Border Farm a man splits the yellow-kissed flesh of a melon, exposing its insides. This image remains with me; I imagine the melon as completed experience, the film as the splitting force. What's inside the melon, aside from the chasm of its hollow, is the seeds, the delicate fragments of the story that the filmmaker, having exposed, tries to mould back together. Does she succeed, or does she blow everything further apart? I can't say.

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