Film Screening: ‘Life is Wonderful: Mandela’s Unsung Heroes’ Monday 28th October 2019, 17.00-19.00 Sir Joseph Hotung Auditorium Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, University of Oxford

The Bonavero Institute of Human Rights is delighted to screen the film ‘Life is Wonderful: Mandela’s Unsung Heroes’ in association with Oxford Junior Lawyers Against Poverty. The film is written and directed by UK-based retired High Court judge Sir Nick Stadlen.

The documentary film is about the 1963/4 , at which was sentenced to life imprisonment for resisting white domination in -. In relating the immense courage and resilience of the 10 leading struggle activists who were accused in the Rivonia Trial, the film focuses on the three surviving Rivonia Trialists at the time – Andrew Mlangeni, Dennis Goldberg and , as well as their lawyers and family members involved. The film won the award for best international film at the South Africa International Documentary Film festival last year, was screened by M- NET in South Africa on the centenary of Mandela’s birth and by Channel 5 in the UK and the US premiere was hosted by the Motion Picture Association of America in Washington DC. In January.

The film raises important questions about the principle of non-racialism and the ability of ordinary people to change the world as well as the role of law and trials in South African history.

The duration of the film is 90 minutes, and will be screened at the Sir Joseph Hotung Auditorium, followed by a short panel discussion. The panel comprises filmmaker Sir Nick Stadlen, historian Professor Colin Bundy, equality law doctoral candidate Nomfundo Ramalekana and will be chaired by former justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, Professor Kate O’Regan.

There will be wine and nibbles to carry on the conversation.

Sir Nick Stadlen is a former judge of the High Court of England and Wales. He was educated at St Paul's School, London and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read history and classics and was President of the Cambridge Union in 1970. Since retirement in 2013, he has been researching the history of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and in particular the Rivonia Trial, which led to Nelson Mandela's imprisonment. In 2015-6 he was awarded the Alistair Horne Visiting Fellowship at St Antony's College, Oxford to research Bram Fischer QC and the unsung heroes of the struggle against Apartheid 1960-1966.

Professor Colin Bundy is a South African historian, who has retired after a career as an academic and university administrator. He served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand, Principal of the School of Oriental and African Studies, and Principal of Green Templeton College, Oxford. As a scholar he was best known for his Rise and Fall of a South African Peasantry; since 2012 he has published four books in the Jacana Pocket series: biographies of Govan Mbeki and Nelson Mandela, an assessment of post-apartheid South Africa, and a study of poverty in South Africa, past and present.

Nomfundo Ramalekana is a South African doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford. Her research interests are in equality and anti- discrimination law, human rights, critical race and feminist legal theory as well as African Constitutionalism(s). Her current research is on affirmative action in South Africa.

Professor Kate O’Regan is the inaugural Director of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights and a former judge of the South African Constitutional Court (1994 – 2009). In the mid-1980s she practiced as a lawyer in Johannesburg in a variety of fields, but especially labour law and land law, representing many of the emerging trade unions and their members, as well as communities threatened with eviction under apartheid land laws. In 1990, she joined the Faculty of Law at UCT where she taught a range of courses including race, gender and the law, labour law, civil procedure and evidence. Since her fifteen-year term at the South African Constitutional Court ended in 2009, she has amongst other things served as an ad hoc judge of the Supreme Court of Namibia (from 2010 - 2016), Chairperson of the Khayelitsha Commission of Inquiry into allegations of police inefficiency and a breakdown in trust between the police and the community of Khayelitsha (2012 – 2014), and as a member of the boards or advisory bodies of many NGOs working in the fields of democracy, the rule of law, human rights and equality.