KZNSA Screening 15 March 2018

Join us on Thursday 15 March 2018 for a free public film screening of ‘Becoming Visible’ by filmmaker Janet Solomon.

KZNSA cafe will be open from 5.00 pm for meals and drinks before the screening. Screening starts at 7.00 pm There will be a Q&A session after the screening with the filmmaker and Dr Jennifer Olbers.

About the film:

“This documentary began when I picked up my camera and drove to a beach to look at the third humpback whale to strand, in the first week of August 2016. It advances the theme of nature as political asset and questions the scripts of consumptive economics embedded in South Africa’s governmental approaches to environmental policy.

This said I believe the issues raised by this film are pertinent to very many coastlines around the world experiencing a push for oil and gas development at a time when countries committed to the Paris Agreement are busy divesting from the oil industry.

The reality is that ocean health is grounded in and conditioned by our relationship to it. Becoming Visible investigates the risks posed by unilateral and indiscriminate traumatizing noise exposure from marine seismic surveys to many marine species, and the vulnerability of fishery-based livelihoods to these impacts.”

Film synopsis:
Becoming Visible is a short multiscreen environmental documentary investigating the politics of offshore oil and gas as South Africa faces Jacob Zuma’s pressing push for a ‘blue economy’. The film focuses on a seismic survey off the East Coast of RSA, which was extended into the whale migration season in July 2016.
Artist filmmaker Janet Solomon foregrounds animal strandings as a way of thinking about the political impunity, the profit motive, and exaggerated scientific and quantitative approach in an age of ‘tough oil’ and heightened environmental risks. This 3 screen installation piece continues Solomon’s aesthetic of the image interrupted, using it as a marker of an acute sense of existential unease as a cumulation of layers impede and intrude upon each other and the subject.

33mins
Directed and produced by Janet Solomon
Vanishing Present Productions
2018
DV

All are welcome.