Brian Tilley (right) and Makonenyana Molete (on the screen), founders of Video News Services which documented the anti-apartheid struggle, in conversation with Candice Jansen of the New Archival Visions programme at the University of the Western Cape.
The founders of Video News Services (VNS), a collective of filmmakers against apartheid, want to make a film about their work during the 1980s and make their archive accessible to a contemporary audience.
VNS was launched in 1985 and two of its three founders — Brian Tilley and Makonenyana Molete — presented snippets of their video archive at a recent public talk at the Centre for Humanities Research in Woodstock. The centre is part of the University of the Western Cape (UWC).
The third founder, Lawrence Dworkin, passed away during the Covid-19 pandemic a few years ago. That reawakened efforts around the VNS archive.
“The process started when a whole lot of the master tapes we did in the 1980s, which had been in Lawrence’s basement, was moved to my house and I unpacked it. Lawrence had passed away,” said Tilley at the recent talk.
