Tonight’s film, by Spanish documentary filmmakers Gabriela Gutierrez Dewar and Sally Gutierrez Dewar, documents the lives of the 20,000 displaced African refugees in a squatter camp called Freedom Park. It is a place where fifty percent of the women are infected with HIV.
The Tapologo (“place of rest”) mission was founded by Bishop Kevin Dowling in 1993 to provide dignified care to the ill and dying in Freedom Park, a squatter camp of over 25,000 impoverished inhabitants situated on the outskirts of Rustenburg, South Africa. In 2005, Bishop Dowling was awarded Time Magazine‘s European Hero Award, in recognition for his efforts in raising money to run AIDS prevention programmes.
In this video, Bishop Dowling talks about the establishment of Tapologo and the work of the home care teams that are profiled in the documentary.
Tapologo screens Tuesday, March 2, 7 PM at Jackman Hall, Art Gallery of Ontario, part of the 7th annual Toronto Human Rights Watch Film Festival.
Buy your tickets here.
Freedom Park squatter camp, South Africa, is home to a migrant workforce that mines the world’s largest single source of platinum. The mine’s wealth is nowhere to be seen in the worker’s village.
Freedom Park belies its name — it is much less a park than a collection of tin huts of squalor. Freedom is as rare as platinum to the women who have migrated to the camp as a mean of survival. The dangers of this situation are immediately apparent. Too destitute to leave, many have been infected with HIV and lack a means of survival.
“The pain these women feel as their bodies increasingly betray them is brutal, but what lingers most is the documentary’s stinging indictment of the Catholic Church’s stance on AIDS and sexuality, ironically communicated via the heartache and fury felt by one of the church’s foot soldiers: a bishop working closely with Tapologo” — Ed Gonzalez, Village Voice.
Tapologo is a network of home-based care to those living with HIV, started by a group of former sex workers living with HIV. Hope grows as those who have been cared for become care providers, and the camp becomes a community providing basic services that cannot be taken for granted.
Program Notes by Alex Rogalski
