U ndertaken in the aftermath of the 2017-2018 Cape Town water crisis by project partners Victor van Aswegen and Peter Willis, in association with a university institute and with corporate and foundation donor support, the Cape Town Drought Response Learning Initiative employed filmmaking tools to capture, distil and make widely available the learnings from the crisis.

The aim of the initiative was to distil the key learnings from the 2017-2018 Cape Town water crisis, as a recent instance of an urban resilience crisis event with global relevance, capable of yielding lessons applicable worldwide and well beyond the sphere of water management.

The initiative delivered on this aim by first documenting observations, insights and reflections on the crisis in in-depth filmed interviews with senior societal actors and experts across a range of sectors who were involved in crafting the city’s response to the drought, and then producing an array of film-based outputs encapsulating the learnings. Interviews and learning outputs were made publicly available on the project website.

During the first phase of the initiative 39 interviews were conducted and filmed, with a total runtime of 43 hours, creating a rich resource, constituting the largest collection of first-hand reflections on the drought and the Cape Town water crisis. Interviewees were deliberately selected to represent a variety of viewpoints, backgrounds and sectors, including government, business, agriculture, non-profit and non-government organisations, research and academia, independent consultancy and civil society. Between them they brought to the project expertise ranging over a widely diverse collection of disciplines and subject areas: bulk water management, communications, climate change, water engineering, disaster management, resilience, system modelling, water tariffs and restrictions, behavioural nudges, catchment area alien vegetation control, business continuity, governance, social justice.

This yielded a wealth of recollections, observations, assessments, reflections, insights and points of view on the subject, capturing thinking shortly after the crisis that would otherwise have been lost, and gathering it all in one place, as the Cape Town Drought Response Film Library, accessible to researchers, the press and the public. With an average runtime of just over an hour per filmed interview, however, this material is also relatively dense and user-unfriendly.

The essence of the initiative therefore was its second phase, which involved the distillation of key learnings from the raw material in the full interviews, and the presentation of these learnings in user-friendly and digestible format in three series of 56 film-based learning outputs, each with an accompanying text component.

The flagship output of the initiative is the 16-module Learning from Crisis series, which identifies the major themes that emerged from the crisis, and presents on each theme a nuanced consideration of the topic, drawing on a number of interviewee voices, and with an average runtime of twenty minutes.

Two supplementary series, the Spotlight and Viewpoint series, present in total 40 clips running for 5 minutes each on average, offering, respectively, expert knowledge on a particular narrowly defined topic or a personal point of view.

The result is that twenty four months after the crisis a public resource exists that brings rigour, clarity, coherence and perspective to the treatment of a subject of societal concern previously characterised by a large degree of confusion, misunderstanding and factual error.

More than that: an innovative, groundbreaking template for dealing with such multifaceted societal events and challenges has been created, tested and proven, applicable elsewhere, with film in a threefold central role – as capturing device during the shooting phase, far more efficient and less intimidating to interviewees than formal written depositions; as selection, arrangement and conceptual connecting device during the editing phase; as easily accessible presentation and viewing device during the dissemination phase.

Globally, the norm for post-crisis undertakings of this nature is that they are launched and executed by government bodies; in this case, it was undertaken by two private citizens as an initiative aimed at creating public good, in association with a university institute and with the generous support of corporate and foundation donors.

The Cape Town Drought Response Learning Initiative was co-founded and led by Victor van Aswegen and project partner Peter Willis. It was undertaken in association with the University of Cape Town’s African Climate and Development Initiative, and funded by The Resilience Shift as lead partner, and donors Old Mutual, Nedbank, Woolworths, GreenCape, Aurecon, PwC, Arup, and 100 Resilient Cities.

Nearly 100 film outputs
More than 50 hours of material
Completed July 2020
Publicly available on project website drought-response-learning-initiative.org

I n the work over the two-year period dedicated to the Cape Town Drought Response Learning Initiative, I was limited in the production of the film outputs to drawing from our interview material only. With the exception of some images of Theewaterskloof dam and Cape Town in a title sequence and some social media clips, all of the nearly 100 film outputs I made for the CTDRLI, with a total runtime of well over 50 hours, consist solely of talking heads.

Moving to the production of the Day Zero documentary feature, this constraint falls away, and the full array of filmmaking means becomes available to tell this gripping story and deliver the critical learnings from the crisis in a visually striking manner: archive footage from the drought period, footage of Cape Town and the Western Cape water supply system, music, static and animated graphics to make dramatically visible the movement and stark implications of some of the pivotal numbers – a key aspect of the story – and also to crystallise and land the lessons learnt in succinct, sharp, on-screen conclusions.

Not only does the full, powerful array of filmmaking tools become available, but the canvas also widens significantly at the same time. Whereas the longest of the learning-output films in the CTDRLI was just over twenty minutes, here we have the full duration of the feature-length format – 100 minutes in which justice can be done to the multifaceted nature of the event. For the first time the story can be told rewardingly and satisfyingly in its many aspects. Clear, actionable learnings can be delivered without having to gloss over – in order to stay within the bounds of a limiting format – the many interesting nuances, complexities, contrasting viewpoints, and real-world constraints.