Uprize!
by Sifiso Khanyile
South Africa, 2017
synopsis
On the morning of 16 June 1976, a group of school children in Soweto gathered peacefully to protest the mandatory inclusion of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction. By nightfall over 200 of them lay dead, mowed down by apartheid armed forces. Forty years later, this film looks at the world that made these kids, and how, in the absence of political leadership, they stood up to the might of an oppressive state. Speaking to artists, writers, musicians, and teachers who inspired them, and some of the former student leaders themselves, we get a glimpse into 1970s South Africa and the cost of the fight for quality education and freedom. This is especially relevant today, forty years later, as university students once again take to the streets to fight the post-apartheid government on the issue of free, quality education.
about the director
Sifiso Khanyile is a Johannesburg-based, multi-award-winning filmmaker and archive researcher. He’s also a member of the International Emmys. Khanyile has produced 9 films, writing and directing 4 of those, including 3 award-winning documentaries: Uprize!, A New Country, and The Reclaimers. His work is concerned with memory and history and how they continue to shape contemporary imaginations of South Africa. His ongoing project, Black Joy Under Apartheid, foregrounds black leisure and pleasure under apartheid to offer counter-hegemonic narratives to black victimhood. As an archive researcher, Khanyile has presented at archive symposiums such as the Visionary Archives Festival at the Arsenal in Berlin (2015). He is currently writing his debut narrative feature, Problematik, which was developed as part of the Venice Biennale Cinema College (2021–2022) and the Venice Gap Financing Market.
