Girls Apart

Sylvia, a 16-year-old black girl, resides in the black "township" of Soweto. Sisca, a 16-year-old white girl, lives some 15 miles away in a white suburb of Johannesburg. The two girls have never met. Combining interviews and documentary footage, the filmmakers ask the two girls to talk about life in South Africa. Not surprisingly, each has a very different version of South African reality. Sylvia, a student activist, has been arrested, shot at, and subjected to electric shock by the South African police. She believes that "war is necessary ...because the police are killing people." Sisca, on the other hand, appears to live in an isolated world of political naiveté. For her, apartheid is something that happened in the past--not an ongoing reality. While the interviews with the girls are both interesting, and ultimately disturbing, some of the filmmakers' additional "points" are bothersome. When Sisca's family is eating turkey dinner, the cameraman zooms in on mouths chewing bountiful bites (one can ridicule a family for being well off; but the same scene could be shot with a white Skid Row bum, on the one hand, and an accountant's Thanksgiving dinner, on the other.) Too, when questioned about inter-racial relations, Sisca's family is against it, while Sylvia's family sees no problem. Each is certainly entitled to their own opinions--what's disturbing is that the very nature of the film makes these remarks representative of an entire race, black or white. And that cannot be and is not supported. These minor quibbles aside, Girls Apart is indeed a thought-provoking film that would serve as an excellent discussion starter in the classroom. Recommended for junior and senior high school libraries. (See AFTER THE HUNGER AND THE DROUGHT for availability.)