All is set for the 4-day annual healing and reconciliation film festival, the Asakhe film festival, which begins this Monday.
The festival will feature film screenings, open lectures and workshops with journalists on transitional justice.
Running for the third time this year, the festival aims to support national efforts at healing and reconciliation in the nation.
Last year, the majority of screenings were presented online owing to the Covid-19 pandemic-induced shutdown.
The festival will be running under the theme: “Truth and Memory” and opens with a documentary titled “We will crush them”, which highlights how the State unleashed violence in Matabeleland and Midlands under the guise of looking for dissidents.
Guest lectures, and journalists’ training, would follow this while on October 28, CITE will launch a book titled, ‘Memory and Erasure: Gukurahundi and the Culture of Violence in Zimbabwe.’
Copies of the book will be sold for $15
CITE Director Zenzele Ndebele said the festival will focus on truth-telling to find victims’ closure and promote reconciliation within communities.
“Truth-telling helps in community healing and preventing the recurrence of past abuses. It also helps identify the necessary reforms to prevent such violations from happening again.”
Ndebele pointed out that CITE makes use of alternative media channels to advance discussion on transitional justice in Zimbabwe, with a particular emphasis on the historical injustices that took place in Matabeleland and the Midlands in the 1980s.
Zimbabwe has in the past gone through violent conflicts including the early 1980s Gukurahundi massacres which despite the existence of the National Peace and Reconciliation Commission (NPRC), have not been resolved.
President Emmerson Mnangagwa tasked traditional leaders to solve Gukurahundi and last week launched the start of the Gukurahundi Community Engagement Processes which will be held in jurisdictions under chiefs from Matabeleland.
OOOOOOOoooo, we heard you screened “Trust Me” Documentary – hosted by the American Film Showcase. As our Getting Better Foundation’s resident media literacy expert and the film’s Impact Producer, I would have loved to have been involved in any panel discussions. Please let us know how we might best be of service to counter mis- and dis-information in Zimbabwe.