YELLOW and DAN are Rastafari youth from the Lotus River ghetto near Cape Town. They are talented musicians of the Zion Youth Crew and are academically motivated. Yellow studies journalism at the Peninsula Technikon and Dan studies photography at the University of the Western Cape.

While the two friends work to complete their degrees they remain creative in a time when many youths perish through gang violence, drugs and disease – mainly due to poverty. They love to move around and hang out with the Rasta brethren, praising His Majesty, and doing what they love best - Chanting.

This Saturday ZYC burn Babylon down with their fire lyrics - their prophetic message both an inspiration and a warning to the youth in the ghetto.

ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
Vaughan Giose has been following the friendship, the musical career and other adventures of the two youth for over 5 months now, documenting their spiritual, musical and personal journeys.

Crawford 01:00am - 17 November 1989

Automatic rifle fire ripping through quite Crawford Estate. Mortar fire pounding the house at no. 146 Church Street. Hand grenades contributing to a full scale fire fight that laid siege to this middle class Athlone suburb. After a final blast it emerges that the lone gunman who kept a squadron of police and soldiers at bay for 7 hours was, 20 year old Anton Fransch, son of Bonteheuwel and member of uMkhonto we Sizwe. Anton’s last stand left a lasting impression on the psyche of Bonteheuwel.

13 Years on and the gunpowder had not settled on this skirmish. One of the many still haunted by Anton’s memory and legacy is his closest friend, comrade and fellow MK soldier, Andrew November known to Bonteheuwel as Gori. A relationship fused in petrol bomb fire. So close were Gori and Anton they made a blood pact. In the event of either of them getting killed, the other was to avenge his death by killing the person who betrayed him.

An important yet painful film to make for Eugene Paramoer, Current Affairs broadcast journalist, Documentary and Drama Director and former MK Activist. He spends hours with the characters in painful recollection and mutual respect, he flips through the newspaper clippings recounting the event, he scrolls through the archive footage of the funeral.
Suddenly Eugene recognises himself as an image appears of a scrawny teenager - addressing the masses at Anton Fransch’s funeral - and the filmmaker finds his place in the story.

Anton Fransch, freedom fighter and soviet trained military leader fires his AK 47 from window to window as the security forces including a military battalion surround his house in a siege which lasted seven hours. He made the ultimate sacrifice at 7:00am pulling the pin on his last hand-grenade. On the 17 November exactly 13 years ago, Anton Fransch died a hero.

RECREATED SCENE OF ANTON'S LAST STAND

Grumpies takes us on a musical journey of healing.
In the 1970’s Grumpies was a singer and musician in some of the top groups in South Africa and toured with The Rockets and Jonathan Butler. As he was about to go on tour to America he became ill and disappeared into oblivion.

Now, 20 years later we find Grumpies a lackey in a gangster’s backyard in Heideveld on the Cape Flats. In this hotbed of violence he entertains and mesmerises his audience with music and song in a community without dreams. Here his voice is able to silence the cacophony of loud, boastful voices of reckless young men. He doesn't talk much but when he sings people stop to listen - He sings as he journeys through the ganglands and his voice spreads calm soothing a torn community, helping it heal. Grumpies dreams of one day returning to the stage.

ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
"I was visiting a friend in Heideveld when this guy Grumpies entered the backyard. I scanned him once, registered and discarded him in a blink of an eye.

When the guy said that Grumpies was going to sing us a number I was only half listening, expecting to hear a wail or a drunken warble, but Grumpies, his voice quivering with emotion, grabbed my full attention."
J. Fredericks

So what's in a name?

Native Yard 1 or NY1 as people familiar with the Street call it, is one of the famous streets in Gugulethu. It’s name reference the residents love NY1.

This street has united the residents over the years. During the Apartheid Era Gugulethu residents would gather in this street to protest against the injustices of the regime. The Guguletu 7, Amy Biehl are some of the people that come to mind when remembering the pain and blood lost on NY1.

NY1 also cuts through two ways of life. In some sections street you find hostel dwellers that have come with their influence of rural lifestyle. The street is divided in two. People who are born here. People who come from the rural areas live their lifestyle completely different to the modern modern township lifestyle of this street will be the underlying theme of this film.

NY1 is also the "showoff" street:
When you have some fashion to display both young and old come to show off. It is said if you want to see beautiful trendy girls, latest cars and street bashes - This is the street to be in Gugulethu.

Guguletu residents share their thoughts and feelings on Native Yard 1 on the eve of the street changing of name.

ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
Ntombi Mzamane grew up in Guguletu, and every day she still travels the road to get to work. Today she decides to pay a little more attention, as she explores the road’s meaning to her community with a Sony VX1000 video camera in hand.

Coline Williams, a spiritual and God-fearing young girl, saw the injustices of apartheid and joined the armed struggle. On 23rd July 1989 she was brutally murdered by apartheid's operatives. Her sister Selina still searches for answers. Coline's spirit is not at peace.

WINTER IS JULY tells the story of Coline Williams, through the eyes of her younger sister Selina, who took the case to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Selina still has many unanswered questions, but regards Coline as a hero, someone who was prepared to die for her beliefs. Selina is concerned that Coline's memory has been misrepresented.

Coline came into the struggle as a young Christian and was a member of an organization called Inter-Church Youth. Selina has kept a file of all the articles that Coline collected. It was this impulse that sent her out on that night, together with Robbie Waterwich, to plant a limpet mine at the Athlone Magistrates' Court - an assignment that was part of a broader military operation of the Ashley Kriel Detachment to bomb targeted places that were to be used as polling booths in the upcoming election.

Just what went wrong on that night is still not very clear. What emerged from the TRC Investigative Unit is that Coline and Robbie never reached their intended target. Instead, their badly disfigured and mutilated bodies were found at the scene of an explosion behind the toilets on

Lower Klipfontein Road, Athlone. The limpet mine had been tampered with, and had exploded before they could detonate it. Or so the story goes.

ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
Beverley Mitchell was in a police cell with Coline in the 80's and has been very passionate about telling the story of her comrade and friend. Over the years Beverley has developed an excellent portfolio of documentary and current affairs work for the SABC.

In the early 1960's a small group of activists from in South Africa’s Cape Peninsula formed the Yu Chi Chan Club. One of the first units of the armed wing of the African National Congress, its aim was to overthrow the violent Apartheid regime by waging a guerilla war.

More than thirty years later Gerald Giose, a survivor of that crucial era tells the story of how the Yu Chi Chan Club that includes members such as Dr Kenny Abraham, Dr Neville Alexander and Don Davis became an international organization formed to fight the racist South African regime as well as the colonial regimes in Mozambique, Angola and Namibia.

Gerald's personal story involves his witnessing, as a child, of a racial attack on his father from which he never fully recovered to his own arrest aboard the Swedish ship, the Sunnarin, his subsequent torture and imprisonment at the hands of the Apartheid Government and his continued harassment by the Security Police through the seventies and eighties as well as the death of his own mother under suspicious circumstances.

Speaking to Gerald in his home town, Elsies River, we are reminded of the daring risks people took fighting against the brutal system of Apartheid but also of our duty to preserve what has been achieved and to continue the universal struggle for freedom.

The story is based on the testimony of the filmmaker's father, Gerald Giose in the Swedish publication, Voices of Liberation in Southern Africa and is told by Gerald himself through the lens of his oldest son, filmmaker Vaughan Giose.

ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
Vaughan Giose is director of Rainbow Circle Films and has been wanting to look at his own father's life and role for some years now. Influenced by a life of brutality under apartheid, Vaughan sees in the film an opportunity to celebrate and provoke thought about what is happening to his father and others like him.

A decision to go and search for roots changed the lives of two families when Giorgio meets his grandmother KERLINA AFRIKANER for the first time.

Born into a farmworker's family on the West Coast in the Swartland, Kerlina started working as a domestic worker when she was six years old. Life wasn't easy on the farms working for the white farmers. She explains how she had to send her eldest four daughters to work when they were only 10 years old.

One of her daughters, Magrieta, left to go to Italy 30 years ago, and she never heard from her again. Thirty years later Ouma Kerlina has the shock of her life when Giorgio, one of her grandsons from Italy comes to South Africa to look for his family. She introduces him to his history, his family and his roots. She introduces him to a large family of aunts and uncles, cousins and other relatives. Both communicate in broken English as they discover each other and their worlds apart.

Giorgio reflects on his meeting with his grandmother, who now has become an important figure and hero in his life. Through her he begins to unravel the country and people he belongs to.

ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
Martina has been producing documentaries for several years and is also director of Rainbow Circle Films. She has been working on the film for 8 years.