BIFF review / In the Shadow of the Sun ******

Director: Harry Freeland
Where: Liberty Theatre
Showing: Thursday, April 18 at 9:15pm

Heartbreaking. There is simply no other word to describe the plight of albinos in Tanzania, so thought-provokingly explored by In The Shadow of the Sun.

British writer-director-producer Harry Freeland’s documentary gets to the heart of the prejudice and constant threat the country’s 170,000 albinos experience every day.

The majority live in the Lake Ukerewe region, having been shunned by society but their lives — and limbs — remain in real danger.

Influential witch doctors have spread the belief that rituals involving body parts of albinos equate to a quick road to good fortune and riches, and therefore an end to the acute poverty many in the country face.

The facts — 62 albinos murdered — and the human impact of the prospect of more ritual killings are brought to you mainly through the pilgrimage of Josephat Torner, an heroic albino-rights campaigner who leaves his children and loving wife to confront the villages where these killings are happening and visit the schools and ‘camps’ where rejected albinos have come together.

The other main player is the young — and wonderfully named — Vedastus Chinese Zangule, an albino who harbours ambitions to be an electrician. He can’t get the education he craves and is only alive because his mother refused to kill him after birth. The father deserted them both as a result.

Vedastus and other albino children are ostracized at school. After constant rejection, Verdascus, with solemn resignation, explains he just “goes home”.

If that doesn’t make your heart bleed, then the matter-of-fact way one girl describes how she was attacked at her home and had her arm cut off will leave you with tears in your eyes. The cruelty is brutal and the scars so visible.

The one aspect of the film under-explored is the role of the witch doctors, the unseen predators, whose influence leaves albinos scared to sleep at night for fear of being attacked and  dismembered.

One witch doctor explains — with disturbing factual certainty — why albinos and their body parts are a guarantee of good fortune. The fact he explains this to Josephat in his imposing, sinister-looking cave just makes you warm to the brave campaigner even more.

He is remarkable and rightly dominates the story — from his interviews with abandoned albino children to his rousing rhetoric to villagers where he confronts head on their belief he is cursed.

Josephat also has a goal — to climb Mount Kilimanjaro to raise awareness of his people’s plight and the latter part of the feature follows that quest.

Inspiring and distressing, this is a cause that at the very least deserves 84 minutes of your time.