To be released 2025/26, length 60 mins., English/Xhosa/Zulu with subtitles.

Against the history of South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle, WE ARE NOT AFRAID explores music’s critical role as resistance for political prisoners held in apartheid prisons over three decades (1960-1990), especially at Robben Island (the notorious prison which held Nelson Mandela for 18 years) and the Johannesburg Women’s Jail at the Old Fort. Narrated by former political prisoners, with historical archival footage of key historical moments from the apartheid era, it shows how music performance – from indigenous African genres like isicathamiya, maskanda and mbaqanga to Cape jazz, migrant work songs, freedom songs, Western classical, rock, reggae and Indian ragas – provided resistance, critique, community, therapy, memory and identity for political prisoners, transcending political, linguistic and ethnic differences to unite an oppressed people against a common enemy. Women’s narratives and songs expose the deadly gender-based violence that underlay structures of state violence and express their fight against both racial and gender oppression and dehumanizing prison experiences, which differed sharply to a male-centered struggle world. Through these remarkable resilient individuals, new testimonies and music, the film touches on broader questions about cultural expression as advancing social change and the uses of music by individuals suffering and protesting the violation of human rights under oppressive patriarchal regimes at the intersections of music, resilience, power, violence, gender, race, trauma and human rights.

Excerpt:highlights that touch on the film’s main themes.Introduction:ethical approaches to ethnographic research/media-making in trauma-related research, the importance of documenting crimes against humanity.

To pierce through the overwhelming soundscape of Oaxaca, Mexico’s garbage dump, the local workers’ union, Los Pepenadores, developed a system of communicative whistle cadences. As frontline recyclers from 1980 to 2022, they navigated and sifted through the materials that arrived in the dump, collecting items to sell for their livelihood. This system of cadences—practiced and understood by all 130 union members—served as an intergenerational, union-wide, communicative tactic. Drawing on my fieldwork data and interviews, I argue that these whistling cadences were highly effective due to union members’ virtuosic listening and sound-making daily practices, their deep communal bonds, and their shared ancestral heritage as Zapotec descendants. I situate my findings within scholarship on deep and active listening (Oliveros 2005; Kapchan 2017), community sound and music practices (Higgins 2012), and linguistic assertions of tonal nuance present among Spanish-speaking Zapotec descendants (Sicoli 2015). This paper presents Los Pepenadores as a case study of how a deeply bonded community, navigating a hazardous environment, developed and sustained a sophisticated communication system. Their whistling cadences not only ensured safety and facilitated financial gain but also functioned as a cultural and social practice that reinforced their communal bond and collective identity. By framing these cadences within the union’s 42-year working history in the dump, I demonstrate how this sound-making system sustained and reinforced this community’s survival, solidarity, and cultural preservation.

Martyrdom has become a central theme in Azerbaijani music in the aftermath of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh war (27 September 2020 – 10 November 2020). Relying on ethnographic research, comprised of interviews with war veterans and mourners, I investigate how local people experience the idea of martyrdom through music. I focus on the composition “bayati shiraz” sung by Tajir Shahmalioglu, which has become the main soundtrack of war and the ongoing post-Soviet conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Juxtaposing recent discussions of voice as liminal, affective, and relational (Eisenlohr 2018; Feldman 2015; Meizel 2020) with frameworks from the anthropology of death (Engelke 2019), I argue that the efficacy of this composition lies in the qualities of its singer’s voice to enact emotional work necessary to make sense of death. In addition to the patriotic poetic text used in “bayati shiraz,” the specific timbre of a child’s voice with its high melismatic register serves as a powerful symbol of the contested region, poignantly evoking themes of loss and sacrifice. I discuss how this voice gives a sense of continuity, as it transcends boundaries of time, space, as well as physical and spiritual realms, providing a chronotope (Bakhtin 1981) to encounter martyrs in one's imagination and understand loss as sacrifice for the nation united in suffering. The voice, in other words, performs a type of transaction and exchange, marking martyrdom as “good death” that is essential to the nation’s regeneration.