Introduction: Turning the Lens on Film and Foreign Relations

Abstract

In July 2009, my partner and I boarded a “ferry” traveling from Zanzibar to the eco-resort Chumbe Island. About midway through the trip, a huge wave doused a blond woman sitting near the front of the boat. We began chatting and I soon figured out that she was Connie Field, the award-winning filmmaker best-known for The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (1980) and Freedom on My Mind (1994). That soggy conversation has taken Field and me on a circuitous journey to this forum on her Have You Heard from Johannesburg: Seven Stories of the Global Anti-Apartheid Movement (2010).1 Fusing a lifelong commitment to human rights and her filmmaking expertise, Field has traversed the world documenting social movements. She originally planned to do a four-hour film about the movement to end apartheid but greatly expanded her vision following her first trip to South Africa in 1996. The result is an eight and a half hour opus that takes its name from a lyric in a 1976 Gil Scott-Heron song. Drawn from more than 150 interviews conducted in eight countries, Have You Heard from Johannesburg spans five decades and takes viewers to stadiums and churches, street protests and corporate boardrooms, political debates and rock concerts. It captures the political, moral, spiritual, economic, and cultural dimensions of the anti-apartheid movement.2