Voices of Sarafina!

The title refers to the name of the Broadway-show Sarafina! with which young black South African actors gain great success. The play revolves around the 1976 Soweto uprising where 15,000 schoolchildren marched into the streets to protest the government's insistance that classes would be conducted in Afrikaans - ''the opressor's language'. By the end of the year, over thousand children had been massacred, hundreds were thrown into jails and tortured. Since then the unrest continues.
Nigel Noble looks behind the scenes of the stage for the way in which the young black generation experiences the consequences of the apartheid policy. General problems are being stripped of their anonimity when the actors explain what apartheid actually means to them, how it deforms their lives. The personal interviews (shot in extreme close-up) and the documentary scenes lend the fragments from the Broadway-show a more intense emanation and a deeper meaning. We not only see episodes of a sparkling show but at the same time we experience how young black South Africans try and rise above the sad situation of apartheid through their work.