Lee Hirsch may not like that both he and the film he made are considered
extraordinary.

As he is traveling around the world to promote the film, his only interest
is in the work and its mighty, historic subject.  But how can you ignore
the story of man himself?

When Vermont-born Hirsch was 19 - white, penniless, without film-making
or travel experience - he decided to document the relationship between
the South African struggle against Apartheid and the music of black
townships infusing the movement.

A well-meaning, but obviously quixotic quest.

And yet, the work is now complete: "Amandla!  Revolution in Four-Part
Harmony" is a winner of two awards at this year's Sundance Festival, it
is being shown at film festivals from Mill Valley to Australia, and it
will have its commercial release in January.

Having spent nine years on the project, Hirsch is now that much older,
not much richer, and still white, but he is warmly embraced by many
famous black freedom fighters.  He has traveled more than he likes to
remember, lived in South Africa for five years, a good chunk of it as a
permanent house guest of strangers.

It is the "kindness of strangers" that enabled Hirsch to undertake
and accomplish this huge archiving project, documenting a part of
history that without his effort might have partially disappeared.  The
hundreds who have assisted Hirsch in his quest included Miriam Makeba
and anti-Apartheid singers both in South Africa and in exile, the Lucas
Skywalker Ranch sound facilities, the Ford Foundation, BBC and US news
organizations, the African National Congress, individual donors and
participants, and the distributing Artisan Entertainment.  HBO, the main
sponsor of the film, is generously allowing festival and commercial
distribution before showing it on the network.

Besides the response to his passion and commitment, Hirsch was also aided
early on by the reception of his first short film, "The Last and Only
Survivor of Flora," about his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor.

Engaging music-video producer Sherry Simpson as the film's executive
producer was one of Hirsch's major early triumphs on the road to the
realization of the "impossible project."

"Amandla" is both a documentary and a music film, a felicitous merger
of the two genres, creating, in Hirsch's words, "a `Buena Vista Social
Club' with politics." The title means "power," as in the phrase "amandla
ngawetu" or "power to the people."

Tracing the resistance from the early days of ANC to Nelson Mandela's
presidency, Hirsch's film is a fluent, narration-free, sequence of
interviews and scenes: duets by Sophie Mgcina and Dolly Rathebe, Makeba
and Hugh Masakela singing in exile, huge crowd scenes of overwhelming
musical power.

Music is predominant, said Hirsch in a Marin interview while here for
the Mill Valley Film Festival.  "I wanted to make a film about the use
of singing in the Struggle.  The finished product is much broader.  What
captured me so intensely from the beginning was the energy of the freedom
songs, the a cappella stuff sung on the streets, not by musicians, just
people, and in four-part harmony.

"Just that fact blew me away.  As an American, in a country where people
can't sing even the National Anthem in four-part harmony, this was
amazing.

"In South Africa, there are millions of people with a collective repertoire
of thousands of freedom songs.  Literally, from one end of the country
to the other, people know these songs.  If I started a song that I picked
up in Capetown, everybody in Johannesburg knew it."

His initial interest did not come from sources common to most Americans'
awareness of the music, the intriguingly "exotic," but altered and
prettified recordings of pop musicians such as Peter Gabriel and Paul
Simon.  Hirsch's attention at first was engaged by the songs he heard
in the background of news reports.  He was deeply affected by a scene
in "Cry Freedom," the funeral of Steve Biko, when thousands sang the
national anthem, "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika."

Hirsch admits he was very naive when he started, thought it could be a
quick project. As he kept working, through almost a decade, he realized
he needed to take time, however long, to get it right.  And that he did.
"Amandla" looks and sounds true and authentic all the way through.

 From rural community halls to Johannesburg and Pretoria prisons to
country clubs and schools, the film presents real people being themselves,
and singing from the heart.

Among the many contributions of the film to history and archiving music
is the little-known story of composer-activist Vuyisile Mini.  This
songwriter-poet was among the first to realize and use the power of music
when the Apartheid government came to power in 1948.

Original footage, archived material, some reconstructions, the singers
speaking of their feelings and experience intermingle with such original
material as the 1995 siyanqoba (victory) rally for Mandela.

This substantial, moving scene, which concludes "Amandla," was shot by
Hirsch with a great crew he managed to put together through one of his
typical offbeat fund-raising measures.  A Finnish public television
station paid $20,000 for the rights to the sequence - and Hirsch got
his perfect ending.

Janos Gereben/SF
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