A scene from the “District Six Rising from the Dust”. Picture: Supplied
Weaam Williams’s award-winning documentary “District Six Rising from the Dust” is now available for streaming on Prime Video across the African continent.
Williams shared the exciting news with her fans on social media this week. She wrote: “I’m thrilled to announce that ‘District Six Rising from the Dust’ is now available to view on the African continent on @amazonprimevideoza.”
This documentary is a compilation of Williams’s personal story and heritage.
“District Six Rising from the Dust” is a multiple-award-winning feature documentary of 62 minutes which unpacks the art, history and social landscape of Cape Town’s most-remembered district.
“One of those families is my own. My mother, Nazley Hartley, in her late teens was forcibly removed with her parents, siblings, uncles, aunts and grandparents,” shared Williams.
“A ‘tribe’, a community uprooted from their homes and businesses of four generations. This painful chapter of our family’s history was never told to me until I undertook to make this documentary. Previously my mother only spoke of her happy memories of District Six.
“It is currently the only documentary of its kind which details the decades of history of District Six from the 1960s to 2019 and is presented from the point of view of one whose ancestors have been dispossessed. It is estimated that approximately 60 000 t0 80 000 people were forcibly removed from District Six,” explained Williams.
Through her company, Tribal Alchemy Productions, a boutique Cape Town-based family business, Williams worked on the award-winning documentary for six years, alongside her spouse, Nafia Kocks.
Kocks, the director or photography, was able to capture intimate moments of this autobiographical film.
During this time, she lived in a house in District Six restituted to her grandfather where she came to understand and document the many challenges facing this new fledgling community.
Throughout that time, it has been the story of District Six and the atrocities of the Group Areas Act that pushed Williams to continue despite the violations she and her family faced living in the neighbourhood.
Her ancestral story is like many others, but by adding her personal tale to the documentary, it has elevated the film to another level.
Williams has found her voice as a woman and activist using cinema. She is a multi-disciplinary artist who works with poetry, music and film.
Through commentary, interviews, archival footage and traditional cultural events, she manages to give audiences a unique inside look into a community’s fragmentation and re-emergence.