Marikana massacre film comes to Harare

Miners Shot Down, the multi-award-winning documentary on the tragic story of the Marikana Mine massacre, will be screened by the Book Café on Thursday.

South African director and producer, Rehad Desai, who produced the internationally-acclaimed documentary, will also attend the Book Café screening where he will answer questions on the film.

Miners Shot Down takes a forensic real time at the Marikana massacre of 2012 where 34 miners were killed and over 100 injured.

It has been described as "devastating cinema" and "a heart-wrenching film that resonates far beyond its borders with a story that interrogates the power and ruthlessness of capitalist exploitation in an age of increasing economic inequality.

In August 2012, mineworkers in one of South Africa's biggest platinum mines began a wildcat strike for better wages.

Six days into the strike, the police used live ammunition to brutally suppress the strike, killing 34 and injuring many more.

The police insisted that they shot in self-defence, a view thoroughly discredited by the documentary.

Miners Shot Down tells a different story, one that unfolds in real time over seven days, like a ticking time bomb.

The film weaves together the central point-of-view of three strike leaders, Mambush, Tholakele and Mzoxolo, with compelling police footage, TV archive and interviews with lawyers representing the miners in the ensuing commission of inquiry into the massacre.

What emerges is a tragedy that arises out of the deep fault lines in South Africa's nascent democracy, of enduring poverty and a twenty-year-old, unfulfilled promise of a better life for all.

A campaigning film, beautifully shot, sensitively told, with a haunting soundtrack, Miners Shot Down reveals how far the African National Congress has strayed from its progressive liberationist roots and leaves audiences with an uncomfortable view of those that profit from minerals in the global South.