The Children's Shoes

Last week Simon and I had a lunch with quite a senior person in one of the cable/satellite channels. She is a charming, but pretty forthright sort of person, doesn't suffer fools gladly and may even be described as "tough". It just so happens that she was at the Dubai event at which our films for the Rolex Awards For Enterprise were being shown last November. This lady is not the first person to have mentioned to us that Eddie's film about the AIDS orphans in South Africa had her in tears.

The film is centered around Andrew Muir, an amazing guy who runs an holistic training programme for young people affected by the AIDS crisis in South Africa (because of AIDS, SA has a huge amount of child-headed households). The country's burgeoning eco-tourism industry needs skilled workers and the young people benefit by having stable incomes. Andrew has set up the training scheme, Umzi Whetu to make the link.

For the first time in a long time at a Rolex event I was not running around worrying about the projection being in focus, I was sitting at a table having dinner and being part of the audience. Eddie's film from the first viewings in the office had brought a lump to my throat so I wasn't surprised to see less jaded souls than I with tears streaming down their faces in Dubai. The film is only four minutes so there is a lot of information to get across and engage the audience emotionally with the subject.

I found myself thinking the other day, "what was it that moved people so much in this little film and why is it so efficient at drawing people onto the subject matter?" Firstly there is a music track which is one of Muir's trainees singing an improvised song at a slightly out of tune piano. There are some aerial shots of a township - one storey homes stretch far into the distance. Then we are on the ground in the township and can see these are very basic dwellings. We move inside one of the homes and see their simple interiors, minimal furnishings, soft toys on beds. All the while Andrew Muir is telling us in voice over about what the AIDS crisis has done to families in South Africa. The sequence is very carefully edited by Andreas Torner who cuts back to the trainee singing at one point and a piece of Andrew's in-sync interview. Then there is a shot that is neither beautiful or epic; no fancy pulling of focus or clever panning or tilting - its even a bit gloomy lightingwise. The shot is a close-up of a pair of children's sandals carelessly kicked off beside a bed - for some reason this is the one that always tips me over the edge, it's somehow deeply symbolic whilst being brutally real. I'm not sure if Eddie said to our excellent cameraman Mike James - "look over there, some children's shoes, somehow deeply symbolic whilst being brutally real" or whether Mike just saw it in his thorough harvesting of the scene. Either way, "the children's shoes" are one of the big moments in the films we made last year.

You can see the film here