FILM LOOKS AT YOUNGEST VICTIMS OF APARTHEID

When she arrived in South Africa in 1985 to find that black children, some as young as 4, were being detained and sometimes beaten by government police, Sharon Sopher--a former 12-year veteran producer with NBC News who became an independent documentary maker--did two things.

First, she got angry--angry with the Pretoria government for its “wanton disregard for the preciousness of young life” and with the established media covering South Africa for stepping around the story.

Second, she made a film: “Witness to Apartheid,” a searing look at this untold facet of the apartheid story which screens Tuesday at the Nuart Theatre in West Los Angeles.

For a film maker “whose basic instincts are journalistic,” Sopher says she had difficulties all along the path that brought her 58-minute filmed testimony from an interview session with Nobel Laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu to an expose of institutional child abuse within the South African apartheid system.

“It was easier, in a sense, to let the child imprisonment issue lay as a racial conflict--just a typical wrinkle in the South African situation,” Sopher said recently. “That may be why the story was untold by the established media; it just got lost in the general mess. But these are children , and I found I couldn’t let the story go untold, even though it was going to subject me to some things I’d never come up against before.”

Sopher said she was “outraged” by the details of the government’s persecution of black high school children, and that her first obstacle was her powerful sense of disbelief that “things like this were happening anywhere , no less in a nominally civilized, Christian, Western country like South Africa.”

Sopher found her movements (with a crew of three in an unmarked van) monitored from the first week of production by South African police. At one point in the filming, a police detachment broke up an interview session with the father and brother of a murdered 14-year-old and detained Sopher and her crew for several hours, interrogating them and seizing some of their film.

Another problem was how to sculpt a meaningful story out of the seemingly random victims of beatings, shootings and torturings she interviewed during the month of filming in and out of the black South African townships.

“I kept imagining how I was going to explain this in logical terms, how I might tell this story clearly,” she recalled. “But there was nothing logical going on over there. You couldn’t approach it that way; there’s no way, really, to explain what kind of senseless violence is going on there. I’ve covered wars, I’ve been in socialist countries--I’ve been in a few hard places--but I never experienced anyplace as repressive as those townships. You just have to see it.

“So what I decided to do was imagine that the audience seeing this film was a jury, and to present these victims as witnesses, and add some footage we got during the emergency (declared by South African President Pieter Botha in August, 1985, to deal with escalating black violence). We couldn’t explain the situation; we just presented it as best we could.”

Though she is basically satisfied with the result of her labors, Sopher admitted to some disappointment over “not being really able to convey the full horror of what these people have gone through.”

“In terms of being a film maker--and being a human being--no matter what’s in the film that seems to awaken people to the human rights violations, the torture and the craziness over there, it’s just a tiny pinprick compared to the real pain those people feel. And I must admit, I don’t know how you capture that in a film. But we did try.”