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 [log in to unmask]