WE ARE ZAMA ZAMA

We are Zama Zama is a portrait of the informal miners making a living in the depths of South Africa’s abandoned gold mines. With this documentary film, Rosalind Morris weaves a transfixing narrative about the lives of migrants whose flight from Zimbabwe has led them to seek gold in the ruins. The product of years of collaboration with a community of migrants from across southern Africa, it combines immersive techniques, patient interviews and story-telling to create a textured portrait of the undocumented men and women who make their precarious living in the toxic wastelands of the gold industry. Rosalind Morris is a cultural critic, social theorist and media artist who is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her documentary film work grows out of her long-term investigations of life on the margins of survival, in the worlds made by natural resource extraction. Among these are the feature documentary, ‘We are Zama Zama’ and the short films that comprise ‘The Zama Zama Project,’ (official selection, Berlinale Forum Expanded, 2021).