Sub-Saharan African Sexualities, Transnational HIV/AIDS Educational Film and the Question of Queerness

Abstract

In March 2000, Finnish television producer Iikka Vehkalahti and his wife Katri travelled to South Africa on business. Katri, a journalist, was writing a cover story on South Africa’s HIV/AIDS pandemic, while Vehkalahti was soliciting ideas for documentaries. Filmmakers presented Vehkalahti with a number of ideas for films, but none about HIV, a virus that at the time afflicted over 10 per cent of South Africa’s population. This number would swell to over 20 per cent in the years ahead. The immensity of the problem, contrasted with the global media’s relative silence, compelled Vehkalahti to launch Steps for the Future, a series of over forty educational films of varying lengths (from five to seventy-two minutes) by Africans that provide a heterogeneous perspective on the sub-Saharan HIV/AIDS epidemic. Summarizing his motivation for the project, Edkin and Vehkalahti (2008, p. 4) wrote that he wished

to provide opportunities for [talented African] filmmakers to produce films about HIV/AIDS that would touch people’s souls and minds, not to create condom posters that nobody reads or sentimental docusoaps that no one believes, but real films with real people … How does one make films about HIV/AIDS that show “actually, life is a beautiful thing”, especially in the face of death.

After what could potentially be described as a Herculean grassroots effort at fund raising, Vehkalahti and his co-executive producer, Don Edkins, a South African documentary filmmaker, raised over $7 million.