The Shack - a short film

Chologi’s film, which has won an award at the Kismet Virtual Short Films Festival and a Gold Ovation Award at the National Arts Festival, among several others, does more than illuminate the often obscured experiences of the impoverished. It probes the limited ways in which the lives of people who call shack settlements home have historically been viewed, particularly the structures that make up those homes.

Shacks have historically been featured in South African film and television as an aesthetic of impoverished Black working-class life. But shacks are not settlements of choice and the poverty that defines them is not inevitable. In many ways shacks are a creative response to the state’s failure to fulfil its housing mandate. 

Chologi’s film demands that we think more imaginatively and broadly about these structures. It interrogates the possibilities of a more humane depiction of shacks in cinema. In other words, can the architecture of the shack settlement function as a way to expose the lived experiences and realities of the impoverished? What stories can shacks tell beyond their depiction of South Africa’s inequality? These are some of the questions that Chologi is asking the audience to confront.
 

Abstract based on original source.