Sunday June 1 | 2:30 pm | Pacific Cinémathèque

Director: Louise Hogarth, USA, 2007, 94 minutes

With one of the highest HIV rates in the world—more than six million adults and children currently infected—South Africa has entered into “a new apartheid” in the words of Bishop Desmond Tutu. By the year 2010, it is estimated that there will be 40 million AIDS orphans. The reality of these mind-boggling statistics is brought brutally home in director Louise Hogarth’s documentary Angels in the Dust. Hogarth spent three years capturing daily life at Boikarabelo, a 99-acre farm run by long-time activist Marion Cloete and her ever-supportive husband and two daughters. Boikarabelo is home to more than 550 children, many of whom have lost their entire families to AIDS and who are themselves HIV positive.

As Marion rallies the kids to fight for their lives, the level of misinformation about the disease proves to be one her greatest obstacles—from the myth that sex with a virgin will cure AIDS to South Africa’s minister of health claiming a salad made with beetroot and olive oil will stave off the infection. Meanwhile, the death rate continues to spiral out of control with cemeteries straining to accommodate the number of bodies being buried every single day.

At Boikarabelo, the quotidian details of getting kids to school, cooking and bedtime are incorporated into the business of death. As Marion barters with the mortuary over caskets, visits the sick and helps children cope with the loss of their parents, the true scope of the battle is revealed. Angels in the Dust does not hide the blunt facts of death, but ultimately, it is the extraordinary courage of young children that is nothing short of revelatory. Whether they are confronting the parents who sold their small bodies to men for sex or staging a dance competition, the resiliency of these tiny souls is literally stunning.

Winner of the 2007 Emerging Pictures/Full Frame Audience Award at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and the 2007 Special Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the Seattle International Film Festival, this is an utterly necessary work of art and agitprop.

Director Biography

Louise Hogarth co-produced The Panama Deception, which won an Academy Award for Best Feature Length Documentary. She founded Dream Out Loud Films, a Los Angeles based non-profit independent television and film production company that specializes in true stories about people and events focusing on social and human rights issues.

Film Trailer