A PLACE
at the
TABLE
a
documentary
A PLACE AT THE TABLE aims to start a conversation about what people who live in poverty need to succeed. What does "economic empowerment" actually mean in real people's real lives? Through four South African women’s stories, we examine challenges that many individuals in developing countries face as they struggle to claim their rightful place in the modern world economy.
The film follows three women students and their young advisor through a one-year culinary program at the Eziko Cooking and Catering Centre in Langa Township, outside Cape Town. Filmed over the course of an entire year, in part by the women themselves, the film provides access to a rarely-seen world. Viewers visit cramped homes, meet families and scrutinize new foods. We share anxieties over uncertain commutes, housing crises, family emergencies and experience the sometimes-terrifying world of the modern corporate workplace.
This is the story of commuting between worlds. Here "economic inequality" is not an abstract. It is the vivid, surprising, and sometimes moving details we experience in the challenging terrain of these women's daily lives.
The Eziko Cooking and Catering Centre in Langa Township, near Cape Town
background
urgency
Victor Mguqulwa, Director of the Eziko School, graciously gave us complete access to Eziko classes
and students throughout an entire school year.
Witnessing hours in the classroom and later, students’ internships, built shared experience that helped us ask students the right questions about their new working world. Returning frequently for a year built trust. Although generally guarded with outsiders, students invited us into their homes, churches, and parties allowing us rare access. Gradually, they began to articulate dreams and frustrations they’d kept close.
With Victor’s help, we also gained cooperation from the hotels where students interned. Their supervisors allowed us behind-the-scenes in hotel kitchens and evaluation sessions. We followed the entire year of their program- for 200 hours of video and 65 tapes of video diaries.
We quickly understood these individual stories provided a unique opportunity to look at the ways political and economic realities play out in the intimate details of people’s daily working lives. It’s a story only long-term reporting can reveal. And we do actually feel it is urgent information.
A deeper understanding of the dreams and frustrations of individuals is vital to connect our imaginations to the challenges of the developing world. Challenges like faulty infrastructure, poor schools, colliding cultures, scarce credit, and inadequate, inequitable housing can profoundly shape an individual. We have only to read reports of terrorism or xenophobia to see how personal trauma and frustration can be exploited to have serious and sometimes international consequences.
Growing economic inequality demands that we more profoundly understand how to enable people to help themselves. To do that, we must hear their stories as only they can tell them.
South Africa
is a vast country. The Eastern Cape is over 450 miles from Cape Town.
During Apartheid, black working men were forced to live in segregated townships outside cities and their families were often forceably relocated to tribal homelands, sometimes hundreds of miles away.
The Eastern Cape is the tribal homeland of the Xhosa. Even today most of it is wild and remote, with few jobs or industries. Each year thousands leave the Eastern Cape to come look for work in Cape Town and South Africa's other big cities..
The Townships
The former Apartheid government created the Townships in an effort to purposely isolate and contol the black population. Today citizens are free to go anywhere, but the transportation infrastructure is lacking, so their isolation often remains. Langa, Guguletu, Mfuleni and Delft, are all places where our characters live and study
To link to THE EZIKO COOKING AND CATERING CENTRE website:
*A PLACE AT THE TABLE is completely shot and edited. We are currently raising completion funds. To contact us with questions or support see below or email jerret.engle@gmail.com
*previously tItled -HOW TO HANDLE A SPOON.
Personnel
Producer-Director
Jerret Engle
Cinematographer
Cort Tramontin
produced and co-created SOMETHING WITHIN ME which was nationally broadcast on PBS, and won three prizes at Sundance Film Festival, IDA and Christopher Awards. Other projects: GOD'S ARMIES for PBS series "With God on Our Side", DREAM GIRLS (Discovery Channel), also documentaries for MoMA, the National Institute of Science, plus A&E and other cable broadcasters
is a photographer, producer and cinematographer. He has
produced films for The Museum of Modern Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Children’s Museum, The Sundance Institute, National Institute of Science, Our House and many corporate clients. Cort has had photography shows in San Francisco, Park City, Utah and Venice, Italy.
Co-Editor
Juliet Weber
was nominated for an Emmy for HBO’s RAPE IN A SMALL TOWN, 2006. She edited two Academy Award nominees, DAUGHTER OF THE BRIDE and THE RESTLESS CONSCIENCE. She edited HBO’s SISTER HELEN, winner of the Sundance Directing Award in 2002. Juliet has edited over twenty documentaries for broadcast.
Sound
Jabu Msomi
grew up in Durban and served in the South African Army before going into film production. He has worked with e-TV and SABC and currently does freelance sound work for several Cape Town Production companies as well as BBC and German Television
Camera
RIchard Kruger
has produced and directed his own documentaries for SABC1 and worked as a Director of Photography for Canal Plus, Life Channel Canada, NDR Germany, BBC, Discovery and National Geographic, among others.
Sound
Sebastian Dunn
originally born in Zimbabwe, Sebastian is a Cape Town based sound man specializing in documentary with over twenty years industry experience working with local and international crews from SABC to Endemol, Discovery and BBC1 and 2.