Last month I observed a group of schoolchildren participating in a workshop at the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation in Cape Town. It was invigorating to note their engagement with the stories, photographs, video clips and installations in the foundation’s permanent exhibition, “Truth to Power: Desmond Tutu and the Churches in the Struggle Against Apartheid”.For the first two decades of the 21st century, it seemed to me that young people tired quickly of South African history — in the curriculum, in family and community conversations, in the media they consumed. Now, I think, enough time has passed that teenagers today actually know little about the apartheid era and the transition to democracy. Thus, compared to the eye-rolling of the micro-generations that preceded them whenever the topic came up, they have a genuine curiosity about it.There is something worrying and sad in this too, of course: it represents a broader collective forgetting on the part of South Africans, lending an urgency to the project of making history more visible and prominent in our shared public life. Indeed, as I walked through Truth to Power, I knew that I, too, have much to learn about our country’s past. We all do.So it was with great enthusiasm that I took up the opportunity to watch an advance screener of Tutu, a new documentary that has its African premiere this weekend as part of the Encounters festival.Directed by American Sam Pollard, Tutu is a detailed and lovingly rendered portrait of “The Arch”, as well as of his remarkable wife, Leah. It is also a film that carries their message of courage into the present moment of ebbing global optimism. Tutu insisted, “There is no situation of which we can say: this is totally devoid of hope.”His confidence, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, that apartheid would fall (“When a people have decided to be free, there is nothing that can stop them.”) was vindicated when Nelson Mandela was released from prison and ascended to the presidency. This documentary conveys the infectiousness of Tutu’s joy, as powerful as his unshakeable opposition to unjust authority and his empathy for those suffering at its hands.“I am a man of peace but not a pacifist,” he affirmed. While the film acknowledges the accusations levelled against Tutu — of being a sellout, advocating nonviolence during the struggle and emphasising mutual forgiveness among the “rainbow people” in the democratic era — it ultimately presents a strong case against such reductionist claims.Pollard gives a vivid sense of the raging waters Tutu had to navigate. Constant threats by the apartheid state. Demonisation by white so-called Christians. Necklacing in the townships. The indifference of world leaders to a Nobel Peace Prize laureate’s appeals for sanctions. (Of the apartheid-supporting Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, Tutu declared, “They can go to hell as far as I’m concerned.”)In a gift to those who would later tell his story, the elderly Tutu described his own life in narrative terms: “It has had a beginning, a middle, an end. Well structured. A nice drama.” This film is, accordingly, structured into chapters.Chapter 1, “Birth of a rebel”, touches on his Fort Hare years in the late 1960s, London in the early 1970s, his return to South Africa and the development of Black Theology, inspired by Steve Biko propounding Black Consciousness. Then came the 1976 Soweto uprising and Biko’s murder. Chapter 2, “A voice for justice”, pits Tutu against PW Botha and the viciousness of the white establishment; Tutu became the archbishop of Cape Town in 1986, the same year that the first State of Emergency was declared.Chapter 3, “Finding forgiveness”, foregrounds the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Watching excerpts of the footage, one cannot fail to be moved by the sorrow that the TRC unearthed or by the depth of Tutu’s compassion as TRC chair.Pollard also introduces a metadocumentary level, collapsing the division between those in front of and behind the camera. Among the most insightful talking heads interviewed are the two journalists who followed him closely over the final 20 years of his life, Benny Gool and Roger Friedman. Tutu fondly referred to them as “the Palestinian and the Jew”.On that note, we are reminded that Tutu’s dedication to causes such as solidarity with the people of Gaza — like his activism regarding LGBTQ+ issues, healthcare and climate crisis — emerged from the same core conviction as his anti-apartheid heroism: “In the end, justice and goodness will prevail.”The Encounters South African International Documentary Festival runs in Johannesburg and Cape Town until June 14.