Classified people

About

In 1948, a racial classification law was proclaimed in South Africa. Robert is judged to be of mixed race by the administrative court, while his wife and children are classified as white and reject him. With Doris, his second wife, black, with whom he has lived for 25 years, he recounts the violence of the apartheid.

Yolande Zauberman’s first documentary is a reminder of the relentless and absurd violence of racial segregation, set against the tender chronicle of the couple formed by Doris and Robert. More than three decades have passed and the incredible strength they draw from their love to overcome obscurantism is still deeply moving.

Specifications

Director Biography

Yolande Zauberman began her career working with Amos Gitaï, before making her first documentary, CLASSIFIED PEOPLE, in 1987. The film was widely shown at international festivals and released in cinemas, and was nominated for a César for best documentary short in 1989, the same year that her second film, CASTE CRIMINELLE, was selected for the Cannes Festival.

In 1992, Yolande Zauberman directed her first feature film, MOI IVAN, TOI ABRAHAM, which closed the Directors’ Fortnight and won awards around the world, including the Prix de la Jeunesse at the Cannes Festival.
In 2011, WOULD YOU HAVE SEX WITH AN ARAB? was selected for the Venice Film Festival.

His latest feature, the documentary M, released in 2019, won the Special Jury Prize at the Locarno Festival, as well as the Prix Lumières and the César for Best Documentary

Pedagogical value

CLASSIFIED PEOPLE is a documentary shot by a woman in the middle of Apartheid in South- Africa. It was 1987 and Yoland Zauberman was a young director with a small crew and small money who went there and shot illegally in few days. The film is now an “heritage” documentary, a resource to learn about our past and small treasure of humanity to take care of. For her first film, Yolande Zauberman has to deal with disparate images and she reverses this handicap to condense her message.

Life emerges in synchronized sound in the intimacy of family life, with all its strength and spontaneity. As the filmmaker explains, Classified People is first and foremost a story of love disarming apartheid: «By thwarting all laws and conventions, Robert and Doris also thwart those of love. They are old, but they resist like the rioters, in their own way. Before my eyes and those of the audience, they created an extraordinary force: resistance through intimacy. Robert and Doris embodied a desire greater than fear, greater than hatred. There was apartheid, and it was in its opposite, the mad love between a man and a woman, that I found the most perfect expression of its absurdity.” With hindsight, Yolande Zauberman sums it up in a nutshell: «In Classified People, the people I filmed taught me that the place for politics was the intimate». At the time the film travelled in festivals but it wasn’t used in a pedagocial framework as it is possible to do now and it is for this reason that we believe it is important for the young generation to learn and keep the memories of what happened while having a profoundly human connection with the old couple, their humour and their love.

Info

Original title:	Classified people
Director:	Yolande Zauberman
Country:	France
Year:	1987 restored 2022
Runtime:	53 m
Language:	English

"CLASSIFIED PEOPLE perhaps makes more sense today than it did yesterday. Because we're far removed from apartheid, from the South Africa of that era, we've even forgotten it existed. What seems to us the most profoundly abnormal, the outburst of legalised hatred, was so commonplace and accepted. It's so obvious, it seems insane. And yet it is a mirror for us, of the hatred we have inherited, the policies we have accepted, the history we still carry. Just as crazy as the drunken character who unleashes his racist hatred and says the same thing as the law. Perhaps, no doubt, in thirty years' time, we'll look back at our world today and it will seem just as delirious as the world of CLASSIFIED PEOPLE."

Director Yolande Zauberman

Screenings

Read about the other selected films

All screenings

What are plastics?

While making an online course about reducing plastic waste, Jostein realizes he doesn’t quite know what plastic really is. He embarks on a quest to the university to find out.

Incognito mode

This animation addresses the need for education to address easily accessible internet pornography, especially as it impacts young people’s lives.

Ocean Portrait – The children by the North Sea

This documentary is about a research and art project carried out in kindergartens in Øygarden municipality in 2022, near Bergen. In a joint project, we staged joint exploration of life in the biotope between land and sea with the aim of an aesthetic look at the sea and a local mindset and value set.