the bang bang club

1. In general, what did you like and dislike about the film?

About this film, I really liked that everything was way intensive, I mean during the whole movie I was expecting to see what would come next. Each time the bang bang club went to takes photos to a conflict everything looked real, like if you were actually seen it in the real life, this was a big achievement of the director. It also surprise me, I thought it was kind crazy,  how after they took their car away from the conflict it was like nothing was happening, with an aura of peace and abundance. Anyways, at the end I got a sensation of “me quedé para adentro”, a Chilean expression really hard to translate at least for me because it is really figurative, but it is something similar to “I have no word” and a lot of different emotions mixed so I still have to process everything.

What I didn’t like about the movie, it is the way these photographer were portrayed sometimes. It was kind of sexism I think, usually they were given orders to their couples, and the first  time they went to the disco it was like each one was ssearched for their couple like if they were the winners it was an unnecessary exaggeration.

How does the film make you think about your future role as journalists and film makers/producers/creators/directors?

This film made me thought about how hard must be to work under these extreme situations, where always a journalist will be pushed into the limits, and be forced to keep question himself about some ethics things like when just to do the work?, when to do something from the ones that are suffering? Is it that even possible? Doing the work of telling the world is it enough? Can someone put a criticism for take those photos, even when was necessary?

Also, that I don’t think that I could do that kind of work, I mean to go to a war conflict to put my life in that kind of risk.

3.  In this film, and various of the other films, we have seen how black South Africans went to vote massively in April 1994 to seal the downfall of the apartheid system with the electoral triumph of Nelson Mandela and the ANC, now more than 20 years later, we see many of the problems originated during the apartheid are still present such as land inequality, class inequality, unemployment, etc.

How have the dreams from the anti-apartheid struggle played out since the ANC has been in power? (Remember to use the article South Africa’s Coming Two-Party System)

For what I read from the article “South Africa´s Coming Two-Party System” and some other we had read before for the class, I think that the economic system that rule South Africa has continued with the apartheid, that the political parties that should have carried the changes asked for their supported has carried the same logic as before and only worried about their self and their pocket.

The parties or conglomeration that had called their self from left or with relation with that ideology has turn up into neoliberalism and privatize even more  each economic sector.