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HBO: How did the documentary Ithuteng get started?
Charlie Ebersol:
In the spring of 2004, I was supposed to go to
L.A. for this internship, which fell through. I
had been invited to South Africa several
months before to see an orphanage for
mentally handicapped South African children.
And I don't know what drove me to do it, but I
called my friend, Peter Wheeler, who had
invited me and said, "Are you still going?"
And he said, "I'm leaving in two days." So I
kind of got my passport and threw some stuff
together and went.
He had only ever intended to stay for two days
and thus left after that period, but I stayed for
another five by myself. The kids who were
volunteering at this orphanage for the
mentally retarded were kids from Ithuteng,
and so I was introduced to Mama Jackey and
then I ended up spending a whole day with
her the last day I was in Africa, and it just
changed my view on so many things.
At the end of the day that I spent with her,
Victor (one of the subjects in the film) grabbed
me and said I really want to do an interview.
So he started giving me this very strange
interview. And eventually he just looked
directly into the camera and said, "you know
what? I'm going to change the whole world."
And it was a statement like nothing I'd ever
heard because it wasn't like this guy was
trying to sell me on something. He was just
saying as a matter of fact, I'm going to change
the world and you better get on the bus or
you're going to miss out.
I called Kip (Kroeger), my business partner
who produced the movie with me and I said
Kip, we' got to do this. He looked at the tape
that I'd shot and he said, you're right, we have
to do this. After that we raised the money. We
got Apple and Canon to donate computers and
cameras for us to shoot with.
Kip came up with the idea of using Willie to
direct because Willie had done a couple of
very good short films in high school. So I
called Will and got him to send his films, and
then Kip and I looked at them, and they were
really good.
HBO: How old were you at the time, Willie?
Willie Ebersol: I was sixteen. And I was amazed when they
called me and said, we watched your films
and we would like you to come to Africa to
direct a documentary.
HBO: This was very ambitious for a couple of twenty
year olds, and a sixteen year old to be going to
Africa to shoot a documentary.
Charlie Ebersol: We felt we had a responsibility to make this
film... we'd been given all these opportunities
and gifts in our lives, and so we felt like we
had to do it. And it changed us. It's changed
us completely in terms of the way we view the
world and ourselves.
HBO: What were your first impressions of Soweto
when you arrived?
Kip Kroeger: It's the type of thing that you can't get your
head around until you really step into it. I
mean this is a place that was designed for two
hundred and fifty thousand people, that they
now estimate the population around four and
a half million today. The level of poverty there
was like nothing I'd ever seen. People kill and
steal to survive. And they do it almost
casually. It's staggering, the level of crime in
Soweto.
HBO: What do you think Mama Jackey did that was
so different? Why did Ithuteng succeed where
other schools failed?
Charlie Ebersol: Because she put the power with the kids; she
says to the kid, you have to make the change
yourself. I'll give you the environment, but
you have to teach each other, and you have to
lift each other out of this. No one else is going
to help you, you have to help yourself. And
that's something for a fourteen year old to be
told when they've been raped and beaten and
all this other stuff; that it's on them.
Kip Kroeger: Mama Jackey is the epitome of tough love.
She takes these kids that don't know love at
all, and uses love to show them that there's a
lot more to it. I mean this is a woman that
goes to schools in Soweto and says, I want
your bad kids. And they say, What? She
says, I want the kids you've given up on, the
kids that you've got no hope for, the ones you
don't even know what to do with anymore.
And they say, Well, alright.
And she sits in a room with them and says to
these kids, Alright, where do you see
yourselves in five years? And they can't
answer the question. And then she says,
Alright, I'll tell you, if you keep going the way
you're going, you're either gonna end up dead
or worse, you'll end up in jail. If you come
with me I'll show you there's a life worth
living. And she says to them, I'm not afraid of
you; you need love. And that's what she
provides these kids with.
Willie Ebersol: It's really quite astounding because she has
this ability to really touch the hearts of these
kids because she can really identify with
them. But also she doesn't let that define
them. She uses a tough love system to help
them identify that they have this problem and
then come to terms with it, and still be able to
move on. I think for a lot of people, if they
had half these problems it would be crippling.
But she doesn't let it cripple them. She says
you must move on, you have to live your life.
HBO: Her approach sounds very self-empowering.
Kip Kroeger: It's more than that; she empowers these kids
to be leaders. She brings them to Ithuteng,
and she's the only adult at the school. She's
the only person on that side of it. The kids all
teach each other. She brings them in and
they teach classes to one another and the
more advanced students in each area teach
the younger ones, and bring them up that
way. She empowers them to be leaders and to
step up and to not make excuses and to use
the strength they've got and the opportunities
they have to create their own futures.
HBO: How did you get these kids to open to you?
Kip Kroeger: Willie deserves all the credit for that because
when we first got there, Charlie and I were
coordinating the schedule and equipment and
everything, and Willie took that time and went
and sat down with these kids and really got to
know them, and explained to them what we
were there to do, and they trusted him. That
opened them up to sit down and bare their
souls to us.
There was a girl who told us about how she'd
been raped and given AIDS, and she had just
met us! And that just blew my mind that they
could be that way. And the next thing you
know, she sees one of the other students
crying, and in the middle of the interview, she
got up and went to go comfort that student
and give them her shoulder to cry on. It's a
very selfless existence that they have where
it's not about them and what they're going
through; it's about how they can help
everyone else around them.
HBO: Talk a little about the dramatizations in the
film, and how you came to document them.
Charlie Eberesol: Kip and I were looking at tape on the third
day, and Victor (one of the subjects in the
film) came running in, he said, "I got to show
you this, get your camera." And so I turn my
camera on, and he ran me through school and
then he ran me across the street into this bar.
And it was just mayhem. I mean, maybe fifty
kids smoking what looked to be marijuana
and drinking what looked to be beer and
wielding knives and guns and all this other
stuff. And then this one kid who I've never
met came out, and he had a gun that he was
wielding around. I was really scared and then
he pretended to shoot another kid and I
realized that it wasn't real, and they kind of
stopped it. And they explained to me that
they do dramatizations where they recreate
the environment to the best of their ability.
And the kid who has been victimized by this
particular event, in this case his friend was
murdered. In another case it was a rape, and
in another, a carjacking. The person who's
been either victimized by it, or perpetrated the
crime, writes and directs the dramatization.
The idea is that they step outside of the event
and they can objectively see that it wasn't
their fault, or in the case of the kids who did
the crime, that it was their fault and what
they did to other people. It gives them an
opportunity to kind of extrapolate out the
ramifications of what happened. You know,
why do I feel like this was my fault?
And it's an amazing thing to watch because
like in the case of rape, you know a fourteen
year old girl is directing all these people and
showing them how her stepfather raped her.
And she's getting down to the nitty gritty
details; she puts the entire thing together
piece by piece and there's a moment of
realization where she realizes that it was not
her fault that this thing happened.
HBO: What do you hope people will take away from
the film?
Charlie Eberesol: To really reach for a cliché, healing really
starts in the first person. And no matter how
bad your situation is, healing starts with
crying yourself dry. Just crying and crying
and crying and being real about what's going
on in your heart. And then figuring out that
you're not a victim; that you control how you
feel. You may not control what happens to
you in your life, but you control how you feel.
And that you have to take control of that, and
that's what Mama Jackey does, that's what
she empowers the kids to do. Not to say that
you aren't in a tough situation, but to say you
control how you interact with that situation.
Kip Kroeger: I think her idea that none of these children
that are labeled a lost cause or hopeless are
actually hopeless gives us all a lot of hope,
that no one is ever completely a lost cause
and everyone's sort of got this within them.
And I think she just finds it.
Willie Ebersol: I never really look at the film as a film about
Africa. To me there's a lot of South African
history, and lot of South African issues, but I
think that the model of Ithuteng is exportable
to any situation in the world 'cause it's simply
a tough love system that tells kids that life is
hard and they need to work through it, but as
long as you love and you stick together you
can do anything. I think that's the message.
And I hope the film can spread that message
to kids who are impoverished in America, or
anywhere else in the world.
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