My travels have taken me to many countries, where I have filmed stories that have amazed, moved, delighted and appalled me in equal measure. This is my blog from South Africa last year where I was filming stories of HIV/AIDS… it resonates still as it collides with the story of being life words.
Steve Bassett / Johannesburg may 2007
I close my eyes and see it still … a graveyard … the resting place of almost 1400 babies and small children … red earth graves upon which lay toys, teddy bears, Disney characters, broken memories, detritus of medication that did not work, empty babies bottles – the unbearable waste of the future unlived … the wind blows across the site, a pall across a theatre of war … red dust swirls in front of the panning camera lens … in one corner of the site a weeping funeral party watches as a grave is filled in, shovels glinting, turning the earth against the wind as the dear one is laid to rest so appallingly, tragically early … a lament strikes up, a woman’s lone voice guttural and raw but strangely beautiful … haunting … haunted … it is the only sound against the wind; the soundtrack of this devastating comment on the silent holocaust … 120 babies and small children every month buried, forgotten … until now in a small way I have to believe (or else I trample the hope that this sad sacred ground affords) that the camera gives a kind of voice, a kind of memory to give to a world that never knew them or even cared very much … this will stay with me forever, remain, lodge in my heart, take up residence in my soul … as will the compassion of the woman who cares for so many young lives, who stares at the scene and points way into the corner …”That’s where my first babies were buried; now, in just one year, we are here at 1350″… so everything has its place and we all have our pain, our search and our struggle … a final image … a broken blow-up plastic airplane is fixed to one small grave, a simple toy punctured and earthbound with broken wings … I look up and overhead a jet plane sails across the sky, white against the china blue, its vapour trail a comet of a thousand angel wings … oh they must soar, they must fly somewhere or else all above is silent sky and empty, unforgiving, vicious sun … and heaven unmoved as the children’s laughter falls ever more silent…