Cast members Ryan Phillipe (Flags of our Fathers, Crash), Taylor Kitsch (X-Men Origins - Wolverine, Snakes on a Plane) and Malin Akerman (Watchmen, 27 Dresses) are in the country at present. Last week the two men spent time in Soweto with photographer Alf Kumalo (who will be playing himself in the movie) while Akerman spent a day shadowing The Times’ pictures editor Alon Skuy. Akerman also met the women on whom the character she will be playing is based - Robin Comley.
Herewith a plot summary from www.comingsoon.net
"The Bang Bang Club" was the name given to four young photographers; Greg Marinovich (Ryan Phillippe), Kevin Carter (Taylor Kitsch), Ken Oosterbroek and Joao Silva, whose photographs captured the final bloody days of white rule in South Africa. Two were awarded Pulitzer Prizes for their acclaimed work. The film tells the remarkable and sometimes harrowing story of these young men - and the extraordinary extremes they went to in order to capture their pictures. Anna (Malin Akerman) is their photo-editor, who looked out for them, protected them and made sure their photographs were seen across the world. Based on the book by Marinovich and Silva, The Bang Bang Club tells the true story of these four young men, recounting their relationships with each other and the stresses, tensions and moral dilemmas of working in situations of extreme violence, pain and suffering. It is also the story of the final demise of apartheid and the birth of a new South Africa.
This is a movie that, for personal reasons, I am looking forward to seeing when it is released next year. My two brothers were both journalists in the Eastern Cape at the time in which the Bang-Bang Club is set – the final days of apartheid in South Africa. They called themselves ‘media terrorists’ because they told the truth – at a time when the truth was smothered.
I grew up hearing their stories; I remember the police coming to our front door looking for one of my brothers even as he jumped out a bathroom window in the back of the house – and I remember that one of them was arrested for staging a peaceful one-man demonstration in Grahamstown, in memory of political prisoners. I myself, fresh out of school, worked as a volunteer in the KZN townships in the early 1990s and went to more than one funeral of those killed in the crossfire of those violent times.
So it is with interest that I await the release of the Bang Bang Club – those were unprecedented times in our country; the work done by journalists pivotal in how things panned out; a time when telling the truth could mean death to those who brought the facts to the public’s attention with their lives in their hands.
1 Response to The Bang Bang Club
An enormously tragic yet very special story.
http://www.gregmarinovich.com/BLOG/2010/10/joao-silva-2/ Tribute to Joao Silva. Fantastic blog by GM.
Also, http://blogdajosefina.wordpress.com/2010/10/26/noticias-de-joao-silva/. Interetsing interview!
We as South Africans need to reflect on our past and appreciate our country and the happenings linked to her significant locations. She is another character in this chapter of our history / in the film.
Sarah Pritchard
By Sarah Pritchard (3 years ago)