Roger Horn – South Africa

Roger Horn is an unconventional filmmaker and post-doctoral research associate at Freie Universität Berlin in the Visual & Media Anthropology MA program. His PhD in Social Anthropology, “Memories, material culture, and methodology: Employing multiple filmic formats, forms, and informal archives in anthropological research among Zimbabwean migrant women” included several accompanying films which have screened widely at festival such as the 65th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 2020 Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, and the 21st & 22nd Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festivals. 

Our Great Day 1967, 2018

Comprised of found footage from apartheid era South Africa, “Our Great Day 1967”, imagines what a day would look like if black and coloured South Africans had the same rights and privileges afforded to white citizens of the time. Audio for the film was recorded in one take from filmmaker Roger Horn’s balcony, located across the street from a formerly segregated beach in Cape Town. Despite the filmmakers efforts to integrate the protagonists into areas they were formerly discriminated or excluded from, the painful reminders of the past in the form of domestic worker uniforms and the short or accidentally captured footage of them renders the past inescapable.