Shelley Barry working with the Iranti media and documentation team
South Africa, Johannesburg, 27 August 2015
Iranti was honoured to have Shelley Barry, award-winning filmmaker, poet, lecturer and video trainer at our offices during August 2015. Shelley’s company, twospinningwheels productions aims to explore new languages in cinema and giving marginalised voices access to the craft of filmmaking. The company is dedicated to making the stories visible that the mainstream renders invisible. It achieves this by conducting film training and making films about people who will most likely not see their stories on the screen: women, people with disabilities, the LGBTQI sector, artists, children and elders.
Her brief at Iranti was to work with the Media and Documentation team, doing a training needs assessment, evaluating video footage, identifying content for a new short film and assisting them with crafting a story, scripting, production and how to shoot for the edit.
“Working with an organisation such as Iranti is completely in alignment of my vision for twospinningwheels productions. The work that Iranti does is vital to a democratic South Africa and for an egalitarian society. I applaud the fact that our experiences as the LGBTQI community are being documented via media, which has the capacity to have far reaching impact in this age of technology.”
Shelley has focused on working with the team on the production of a new video, highlighting the plight of trans and gender non-conforming learners in the South African education system.
“We have been working on gender inequality in South African schools. Over the past two years, Iranti has documented cases of lesbian being expelled, bullied and discriminated in schools. Shelley has been helping us with conceptualising the story, scriptwriting and drafting a documentary treatment to make a powerful story,“ says Gugu Mandla.
Iranti will launch this new film in September.