Spanish filmmaker Pablo Pinedo sensational and stirring documentary Noma, which was showcased at the HotDocs 2016 in Toronto, won the Amnesty International Durban Human Rights Award at the past edition of the Durban International Film Festival on June.
Noma, was screened at The Bioscope in Maboneng district in Johannesburg, from the 20 to the 24 August. In Cape Town it will be screened at The Labia Theatre in Orange Street, from this coming Friday 2 September, until the 8 September. At 6:15PM on the screen number 3.
Challenging conventional filmmaking, Pablo Pinedo is very much an auteur when it comes to his well-researched and structured Noma, using his skills as producer, writer, director and cinematographer to create an impressionistic documentary that is different from traditional filmmaking.
Noma tells the story of Nomaliphathwe Gwele, a 25 year old single mother of two, who lives in a backyard in a rented shack, and wants to improve her life. To do that she decides to join a land occupation action to build her own shack in the new settlement but risking violent evictions.
Pinedo found inspiration for Noma when he documented evictions in Cape Town and surroundings, ‘’to be a human shield for the residents and use the ‘media’ presence as an attenuator for law enforcement repression.’’
“After documenting several evictions I felt the necessity of telling the story from before, to make audiences and society understand the reasons and conditions/circumstances that leads someone to occupy land and erect a structure to name home. Theres a real social drama related to housing in this country, that still affects thousands of people, in spite of being 22 years in a so-called democracy, after Apartheid.’’
Based on the true story of Nomaliphathwe Gwele, who represents a huge portion of the South African contemporary youth in similar situation, living in appalling conditions and surviving with a precarious underpaid job in the best of the cases, the documentary focuses in the birth and exponential growth of a new slum, and all that it implies.
“Personally I have been always fascinated by homeless people. That perseverance and endurance that they have strikes me, like Nomaliphathwe, perhaps because it is something completely opposed to the way I am used to live. Diametrically opposed to my comfort zone. Housing issue is an universal issue. We see examples of it all over the world: the favelas in Brazil, the squatter camps in the outskirts of Madrid and the house evictions due to economic recession to thousands of people all over Spain, the Rumanian gipsy camps in Italy…. I lived in Rome, for five years, during that time I spent around 2 years hanging out, researching and shooting with homeless people in the surroundings of Termini, the main train station, for a film about intimacy and dreams.
With more than 12 years’ experience in the TV and Film industry, Pablo has worked in numerous films and documentaries, as a filmmaker and cinematographer, as well in theatre as lighting designer for several plays, among them, The Beauty Of Incomplete Things in 2014. Before setting down in Cape Town where he created http://everywherefilms.co.za, he spent four years in Italy, in search of the Italian neo-realism and acquired strong skills in cinematography.
