The award-winning documentary film, Not in my Neighbourhood (2017), breaks down gentrification (renovating neighbourhoods to satisfy middle-class taste) in three cities that have more in common than we thought: Cape Town, New York and São Paulo.
Encounters’ 2018 Audience Award Documentary: Not in my Neighbourhood by Kurt Orderson
South African filmmaker, Kurt Orderson (37), manages to document and inform the world about the issues of gentrification, displacement and spatial violence in this documentary film. It exposes the damage that the white capitalist order is causing in the lives and living spaces of the ordinary working-class population.
The documentary film shows the reality of inequality in Cape Town and more so, shows the possible repeat of history – forced removals of 1960 – in the area of Woodstock.
The Old Biscuit Mill in Woodstock, Cape Town, is an example of what gentrification is. Attempts were made to forcefully remove residents of Woodstock and Salt River from their homes to make space for middle-class capitalists, to drink matcha-tea lattés at a weekly market, and glorify the living conditions of working-class families.
One of Woodstock’s residents in Orderson’s documentary explains how he was asked to leave the Old Biscuit Mill, in his very own hometown: “What are you doing here? If you’re not buying anything, you need to leave”.
The reality of gentrification is that “everything is about money, nobody cares about your family or about your heritage,” adds Graham Beukes (39), a resident of Bromwell Street, Woodstock.
Cape Town is currently second in the Gini coefficient ranking – a rank measuring the degree of economic inequality in a population.
“Capitalism needs to fall! I’m an advocate for Land Reform, and yes this means that white people who benefited directly from colonisation/apartheid need to give the land back. This means that in areas like the Boland district, farmworkers need to below stakeholders in the running of commerce, especially on wine farms that are still largely controlled by white farmers who have access to the global export market. There’s obviously a very clear/ direct correlation with the legacy of apartheid spatial planning and economic inequalities that we see throughout Azania (South Africa), so this means that we need to rethink our current economic policies around ownership to real estate and creating inclusive policies that go beyond BEE,” comments Orderson on how to close South Africa’s economic gap.
Director Orderson and camera crew shooting in São Paulo, Brazil. PHOTO: Alessandro Vecchi
The documentary was screened at Pulp Cinema in the Neelsie on Tuesday and Friday (5 and 8 March) and has a running time of 86 minutes.