Conflict/Reportage UK Premiere

Steven Silver/Canada/South Africa/2010/113 min

Showing @ Filmhouse, Tues 21st of June, 22:10, Sat 25th June, 19:50

Apartheid, racism, violence and the media all come under the spotlight in Steve Silver’s The Bang Bang Club, a film based on a true story that questions popular attitudes towards war correspondence.

When Greg Marinovich (Ryan Phillippe) begins documenting the troubles in South Africa, he becomes part of the infamous Bang-Bang Club, a group of combat photographers, including Kevin Carter (Taylor Kitsch) and Joao Silva (Neels Van Jaarsveld). But their quest for the perfect shot soon starts to take its toll as the world’s media descend on them with devastating consequences.

Based on Marinovich and Silva’s book, The Bang-Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War, Silver’s screen adaptation is a thorough and at points devastating recreation of the violence and social unrest of South Africa in the 1990s. Beginning before the end of apartheid and the historical South African General Election, the film relives the events and tensions of South Africa through the eyes of the most objective people around: the photographers. The decision to concentrate on the photographs the men took and not the circumstances that surrounded the images is a clever and refreshing one, as it allows the audience to concentrate on the photographer’s story. But what’s really interesting about The Bang Bang Club is the philosophical questions it creates, such as were the characters pursuing images for the recognition or the monetary reward? While this is never fully answered, it’s clear that whatever role a photographer wants to take in a dangerous situation is up to them; their main objective remains reporting the news regardless of how brutal it is, because we need to know what’s going on. The Bang Bang Club is a realistic, unnerving and thought-provoking film that refuses to shy away from showing the most terrifying aspects of conflict in order for us to fully understand them.