Anita Khanna

Capturing Water delves into Cape Town’s escalating water crisis, a growing emergency in recent years. As pollution of natural water sources worsens and industrial and urban developments threaten access to clean water, government responses remain inadequate.

Taking place between two major climate conferences – COP26 Glasgow and COP27 Sharm el-Sheikh, Temperature Rising uncovers the barriers to climate action and calls loudly for movement building from below, at a time where the very survival of large numbers of people depends on what activists can get political leaders to do.

An unflinching look at the #FeesMustFall student movement that burst onto the South African political landscape in 2015 as a protest over the cost of education. The story is told by four student leaders at Wits University and their Vice Chancellor, Adam Habib, a left-wing, former anti-apartheid student activist. When Habib’s efforts to contain the protest fail, he brings 1000 police on to campus. There are dire consequences for the young leaders. By blending dramatic unfolding action with a multi-protagonist narrative, much of the drama lies in the internal struggles the activists have around the weight of leadership. Threaded through the film is a pulse of anticipation, shared across the generational divide, that somehow these youth have reached breaking point and won’t back down until they achieve the kind of social transformation that previous generations had long given up on.

The Battle for Johannesburg captures the changing face of a city that’s preparing to host the 2010 FIFA World Cup. It’s a tale of property developers vying for sections of the crumbling city with renewed excitement, of a city council determined to create a world-class city and ultimately of how this affects the hundreds of thousands of people who have made the city slums their home. There is money to be spent, even more, to be made and conflicting interests are at stake. As whole areas around stadiums get a brush-up and the middle classes, black and white, begin to move back in, beneath the scramble for property and space is a human story of survival. The eyes of the world are on South Africa. The film raises universal questions such as does urban development have to mean gentrification and is it possible to create a world-class city for all?

South African filmmaker Rehad Desai details the lose-lose situation facing the San Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in this eye-opening documentary.

When a potentially devastating new virus emerges in early 2020, acclaimed documentary filmmaker Rehad Desai is already following a vaccine clinical trial that could finally end the decades-long HIV pandemic. Widening his lens to trace this "tale of two pandemics," Rehad confronts the harsh reality that, while antiviral drugs are vital, eliminating the accelerating threat to humanity from emerging diseases requires making those drugs available to all, while also tackling the poverty, malnutrition and lack of access to healthcare that are fuelling the rise of dangerous new pathogens - and the clock is ticking.

The film narrates the poignant stories of Black families still living under oppression on white-owned land in South Africa, shedding light on the loss of ancestral lands and the ongoing fight for land.

In this documentary, the filmmaker Rehad Desai takes us on an intimate journey mapped out by the scars etched into his family's life from having a father who was intensely involved in politics. Barney Desai was a political activist during South Africa's struggle for freedom, yet as a father he was absent emotionally. Rehad spent most of his young life in exile and became politically active himself. On this intensely personal journey into his past, Rehad realizes he is following in his fathers footsteps as he reviews his relationship with his own estranged teenage son.