Parole Camp Selected for Tri Continental Human Rights Festival

Parole Camp Selected for Tri Continental Human Rights Festival

Parole Camp, a documentary financed by the National Film and Video Foundation has been selected at this years edition of Tri Continental Human Rights festival and this is the first public screening of the film since its completion early this year.

In the Cape Flats, a township in Cape Town, South Africa, over a thousand youths walk out on parole each year from correctional facilities. A high percentage faces the risks of re-incarceration shortly after being released. Parole Camp chronicles the journey of three parolees Archie, Asanda and Luthando, released from correctional facilities through the REALISTIC rehabilitation program that takes pace in a camp in Ncamakwe, Eastern Cape. There, youths as young as 16 years old are guided on the arduous path to reclaim their lives from the vicious circle of crime, gangs, drugs and alcoholism that threatens the future of Cape Flats' youths.

Parole Camp offers, through direct observation, a penetrating look into the lives of one-time feared individuals, this time though, as vulnerable persons with dreams, hopes and aspirations. At the Camp, the young parolees (now deemed Realists) are subjected to a strict rehabilitation programme that requires more than discipline. For the very first time the Realists are forced to confront their unsettling deeds without being condemned and the past, with its load of broken dreams is left behind.

Through the camera's eye, the viewer accompanies the three main characters step by step along the distinct stages both external and psychological of the six-month rehabilitation process. The film also explores, in interviews with family members, the collapsed family relationships, and thus unearths the various dilemmas ex-inmates face in their struggle to re-integrate to their communities.

By dissecting and describing the efforts of the REALISTIC program to reinsert ex-inmates in a society that shuns them, Parole Camp strives to challenge the viewer's assumptions of what it means to be out on parole in South Africa, a country marred by violent crime in which a growing number of fearful citizens advocate for repressive policies (i.e. death penalty) strongly reminiscent of the apartheid regime.

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