Film About Despair in South Africa, and School That Offers Hope
By RICHARD SANDOMIR
Published: July 2, 2005
Charlie Ebersol's need to tell the story of the Ithuteng Trust school in Soweto - where traumatized and violent teenagers learn to overcome their young lives' horrors - began with a visit to the South African township two years ago and has produced a new documentary, "Ithuteng (Never Stop Learning)."
Monument Pictures
Unidentified student at Ithuteng Trust School, in Soweto, South Africa.
"I have a great life, and I felt I had a responsibility to tell this story," said Mr. Ebersol, 22, who was a film major at the University of Notre Dame and graduated in May.
The documentary, which was honored in May as best humanitarian film at the MountainFilm festival in Telluride, Colo., is a raw but inspiring journey into the lives of teenagers ravaged by abuse, crime and AIDS. All were recruited by Jacqueline Maarohanye, a fiercely devoted teacher known as "Mama Jackey" who set up the school in 1999. Although some students board there, most come from their own schools around Johannesburg for after-hours and Saturday programs that combine academics, culture, sports, peer counseling, therapeutic dramatizations of the teenagers' own lives and outings to a maximum-security prison.
Mr. Ebersol, who now lives in Los Angeles and recently completed a stint as a production assistant on the film "Yours, Mine and Ours," produced the documentary with a friend, Kip Kroeger, also 22, with whom he had made music videos. They hired Mr. Ebersol's brother, Willie, 18 and a student at the University of Southern California, to direct a 17-day shooting schedule in the summer of 2003 because they admired a short student film he had made on a classmate's dating problems.
"I should have been intimidated, but I wasn't," Willie Ebersol said. "He came back from South Africa, gave me a blanket as a gift and asked me to direct."
The students provided brutally candid narratives of their lives to the young American filmmakers, none more than Lebo, a girl who described being raped twice and contracting H.I.V.
"They poured out their lives and didn't hold back," Mr. Kroeger, a North Carolina State University graduate, said in a telephone interview. "It sears right into you. Here's a girl you met two hours and ago she's telling us about being raped? How can she sit there and tell us that?"
In another scene from the film, an orphan named Dineo, who is described as having been sexually abused by her foster father, the head of an anti-abuse charity, confronts an older girl whose behavior toward her had made her want to give up the program.
"I thought you were a bad person," Dineo says to the older girl. "I hated you so much, but now I'm going to be your mother and you're going to be my mother."
While they embraced, Mama Jackey tried to hold back her tears.
"Here are these kids, who are not taught about love, teaching each other to love," Charlie Ebersol said in an interview. "They will learn to love and share it because Mama said you have a chance now, you have a way to dream."
Although the film does not yet have a distributor, it is winning notice beyond the award. Oprah Winfrey had already known about Ithuteng (pronounced IT-uh-teng) and Mama Jackey, but it was watching a DVD of the documentary during a flight to Johannesburg in June that prompted her to donate a total of $1.14 million to the school, said Gayle King, editor at large of O, the Oprah Magazine.
When Ms. King told Charlie Ebersol of the donation, she said: "He was incoherent with joy. He said, 'Oh, my God, Gayle, I was just trying to raise $10,000 to keep Mama's electricity on.' "Ms. Winfrey's gift was the largest to the school so far, but it has received support from numerous groups, including the National Basketball Association, which built a reading center there, and from Dikembe Mutombo, the Congolese player for the Houston Rockets, who donated $150,000 to build two dormitories.
Kathy Behrens, a senior vice president of the N.B.A., said: "I was with Charlie when he first showed the film to Mama. It was very emotional for her. It was very hard for her to watch Lebo, who had died of AIDS."
The lessons of Ithuteng resonated with unexpected power for the Ebersol brothers. Until last year, theirs had been a charmed life, as the older sons of Dick Ebersol, the chairman of NBC Universal Sports and the retired actress Susan Saint James.
Dick Ebersol bankrolled the film for about $90,000, after Charlie Ebersol and Mr. Kroeger began raising money on their own. Their father gave them guidance on the documentary and helped find film veterans to help his sons in Soweto. Their mother helped edit the film.
But last Nov. 28, a private jet carrying Dick, Charlie and the youngest Ebersol son, Teddy, crashed after takeoff in Montrose, Colo., near the family's winter home in Telluride. Teddy, 14, was killed; Charlie suffered a broken wrist, and eye and back injuries; Dick broke several ribs, his sternum, his pelvis, his coccyx and several vertebrae.
"I walked off the plane with my father in my arms, and my brother behind me," Charlie Ebersol recalled. "I said, 'Oh, God, how can I get through this without my father, and then I had to find Ted. In talking to God, I said: 'How can you empower me, and take away my father's power? I need him.' "
He said the openness of the students at Ithuteng helped him deal with his grief. "Mama believes you must cry yourself dry," he said of Ms. Maarohanye, "and that people shouldn't prevent you from crying. Willie and I employed what Mama taught us in the context of real tragedy."
Willie Ebersol said: "South Africa taught me that I can talk about what's eating me up inside. We learned from the kids that it's O.K. to be sad. If you've been raped, it's O.K. to say you've been raped. You don't bury your grief if you speak about it. You open up."
The film also underwent a transformation after the crash, becoming more overtly emotional with additional music to underscore the painful pasts and altered lives of the students.
"We had a fear of exploiting the emotion," Mr. Kroeger said of their initial framing of the material. "But after the crash, we realized we weren't tapping into our emotions. We had to make changes."
Now, Charlie Ebersol said, the film "represents our trying to find hope in the face of loss."
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