Arts Listings

Moving Pictures: The Grassroots Movement to Stop Apartheid

By Justin DeFreitas
Friday November 02, 2007

Berkeley filmmaker Connie Field has taken on a vast project in her effort to document the global movement against apartheid in South Africa over half a century. Have You Heard From Johannesburg? is a six-part series that examines the movement in stand-alone documentaries. Field has completed the first of them and is at work finishing the second. Apartheid and the Club of the West, which will eventually take its place as the fourth installment in the series, opens today (Friday) at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco.  

The film follows the anti-apartheid movement in America, a grassroots movement that spanned more than 15 years and included the participation of the Congressional Black Caucus and countless protests at universities across the country, pressuring those institutions to divest themselves from all corporations that did business in South Africa. It’s a stirring story of the people overcoming the obstacles of political stasis, racism, corporate interests and the opposition of the Reagan administration in the pursuit of a moral stand against injustice.  

The film includes recent interviews with many of the central players in the drama, including Ron Dellums.  

 

APARTHEID AND THE CLUB  

OF THE WEST 

Produced and Directed by Connie Field.  

90 minutes. Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St., San Francisco. www.roxie.com. 

www.clarityfilms.org.