South African documentary filmmaking has changed substantially since 1990. Repressive state control of the media under the apartheid regime from 1948 to 1990 led to filmmaking that either overtly eschewed the political or made a strong statement on political and social issues. In both cases, personal stories and artistic expression were neglected. Thanks to the official transition to democracy that started in South Africa around 1990, space has been created for a new era in fiction and non-fiction filmmaking.

Since its launch in 1976, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) has been the predominant funder of non-fiction productions in South Africa. By 2009, however, it had become clear that the SABC was experiencing a catastrophic financial crisis. Whereas local documentary filmmakers were largely reliant on funding from the public broadcaster until 2008, they subsequently had to find either new sources of funding or cheaper ways of making films. Once filmmakers became less reliant on the SABC for funding, their adherence to conventional broadcast documentary forms started falling away. This has encouraged an independent documentary filmmaking practice that entails a move away from expository to observational, participatory and performative modes of representation, from the formulaic to the artistically expressive, from broadcast to feature duration, and from filmmakers working with a crew to those working alone and multitasking. We could therefore argue that the cancellation of contracts and cessation of commissions from the SABC accelerated changes in the South African documentary film.

Over the past ten years, the content, form and production approaches of South African documentary films have evolved.1 In the past, many South African films were under an hour, often either twenty-four or forty-eight minutes long, in order to accommodate a local television broadcast time slot. They tended to be rhetorical in approach and focused on issues or topical questions that were explored through sit-down interviews linked by voiceover narration and accompanied by visual evidence. The Manuscripts of Timbuktu (dir. Maseko, 2008) and Tribes and Clans (dir. Mahlalela, 2009) are two examples of recent films that demonstrate the continuing influence of the conventional public broadcast documentary form. International films, on the other hand, have tended to be feature length (seventy to ninety minutes being particularly popular), narrative in approach and focused on characters. Of course, some South African filmmakers have been making characterdriven, narrative, feature-length documentaries for years.