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We Are Together

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by Ellie Bramley
“You can’t all speak at once but you can all sing at once.”

Music takes centre stage in this poignant story about the orphans of Agape children’s home in South Africa. The songs and voices of these remarkable children drive the plot, erupting forth and taking them to places they never imagined they would go.

The story focuses on the sweet, shy, cheeky-grinning twelve-year old Slindile Moya.  She describes Agape: “It’s a place where children live…” she offers more explanation, “For beautiful children!”  Her grin evaporates as she comes to the other truth: “Okay, it’s a place for children where…Oh, no.  It’s a place for children who don’t have parents.”  Her grin always returns as quickly as it vanished. In a film punctuated by so much tragedy, there is an amazing refusal to at any point be sentimental either by Taylor in this, his debut film, or by the children themselves.

Taylor’s at first shaky camera soon steadies and settles on the next three years of these children’s lives.  In a continent ravaged by HIV these children live together in the Agape children’s home, roosted over by the mother hen Gogo “Grandma” Zodwa - she wears furs all year round and has an incredible laugh, at once squeaky and booming.  She set up the orphanage and named it Agape meaning “unconditional love” in Greek.
At first the children flirt with their own voices, a little embarrassed at what ushers forth. There is a coyness when they sing. Mbali, the seven year old who says she doesn’t know why her mother doesn’t fetch her anymore picks her nose as she sings her solo, her tiny hands fidget as her stunning voice effortlessly fills the hall.

Even as the children and their voices grow before our eyes, so the already sunken face of their older brother Sifiso becomes ever more gaunt. We see him struggling laboriously up the hill his younger siblings just scampered effortlessly up to get to the hospice to “find out what is wrong with him” (there is a real reluctance to mention the taboo HIV and an understandable disinclination to accept that diagnosis.)  Later we see one of his sister’s giving him a piggyback home.  He sits in front of the blue house singing with his family: “we are together”.  His younger siblings including Slindile are visiting from the orphanage where they live and he is tragically soon to be buried in the ground beside his parents.  In a film where togetherness is never a given, always a struggle, it is this resilience through song that becomes so incredible.  Even when Sifiso is literally wasting away, his face sunken, he still finds the strength to correct the pitch of his sister singing at his bedside.

The camera rests often on the faces of the children, whether happy or sad it makes no statement other than the children’s own.  There is an intimacy between the children and the camera no doubt there because Taylor had spent time working with them before the lens came between them.  It never flinches even when it returns to the blue family home of the Moya’s, a motif in the film, where the children sing, dance and cry under the shade of the big tree their parents planted, to find a harrowing scene of Sifiso on the verge of his death.  There are no voiceovers: when Sifiso implores his sister from his bed not to cry for him - the camera settles softly on her tears. It deals gently and genuinely with the troubles of these children: the deaths of their relatives, and the burning down of the children’s home.

There is no false worthiness from this filmmaker, he remains absent from the film bar a few questions here and there.  He creates an honest space for these AIDs orphans to become so much more than that label: to show their sadness and their joy and to let their voices ring out as far as New York where they share a stage with Alicia Keyes and Paul Simon.  Despite everything this is a happy film that inspires and impresses in equal measure.
Dir. Paul Taylor, UK/USA 2007, 83 mins

When this film comes out on March 7th  all of the filmmakers’ profits from the film and CD will go to help children in South Africa.

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