COURTESY CINEMA PARADISE Junior Singo plays Madiba, a boy who films the harsh realities of his township with a video recorder he stumbled upon.

‘Camera’ shoots 2 visions
of S. Africa’s future

"The Wooden Camera" Playing at 8 p.m. today and 5:15 p.m. Sunday

The South African film "The Wooden Camera" is an eye-opener for the Cinema Paradise audience, as well as literally for one of its teenage protagonists.

Madiba (Junior Singo) lives in the shanty township of Kayelitsha, close to the big city of Capetown. He and his brother Sipho (Innocent Msimango) are idly throwing stones at a passing train one hot day when a dead man's body is thrown off it, near the two boys.

It is this seemingly random depiction of violent death that will set the boys down life paths filled with good and bad choices, and also sets in motion an intriguing tale of post-apartheid South Africa still working through its tumultuous history of racial and economic inequality.

The boys find near the body an attache case, where inside is a gun and a video camera. The smaller and shyer Madiba chooses the camera and is soon taping his bleak surroundings with a previously untapped fervor. The cocky Sipho's confidence gets a boost when he picks up the gun and its single bullet, starting his dangerous game of life-and-death by brandishing the empty weapon as a constant threat to whomever he chooses.

While Sipho's gun gives him easy entry into a glue-sniffing street gang in Capetown, Madiba conceals his video camera in a cleverly decorated wooden shell and tools around the township in a wheelbarrow pushed by Sipho, taping the surroundings and people of his hard-scrabble life, which include his precocious little sister, weary mother and drunken father.

But by experimenting with shooting through different colors and shapes of disposed-of glass, his desolate surroundings of shanties and razor wire take on a newfound beauty of its own, as his journey of discovery takes him to the big city. There, the brothers meet a rebellious white girl, Estelle, (Dara de Agrella) who befriends them.

Estelle is a teenager of privilege, although it's a class standing she doesn't accept. She and Madiba's common sanctuary is an arts school run by a Mr. Shawn, played by veteran French actor Jean-Pierre Cassal. His love and respect for both his black and white students helps the two flourish -- she with her cello, he with his camera -- and create a strong friendship between the two.

Madiba and Estelle are symbolic of the promise of change from the racist and stultifying ways of their apartheid past. Part of the strength of "The Wooden Camera," besides its appealing young lead actors, is how the film contrasts the lyrical possibilities of art and friendship to the country's still harsh realities.

At its heart, "The Wooden Camera" is an optimistic vision that doesn't turn away from the occasional tragedy found in life shared between the country's black and white inhabitants.