We Are Together: The Power of Song
We Are Together (Thina Simuyne) is an award-winning feature-length documentary about children, music and HIV. Its creation would have been impossible without Apple’s cutting-edge video technology, which empowered two independent British filmmakers to tell the inspiring story of a group of orphans at South Africa’s tiny Agape children’s home. The film follows the orphans as they form a choir to raise desperately needed funds for the home. It’s a remarkable journey that eventually takes them to New York to raise awareness of the impact of the disease, performing with Paul Simon and Alicia Keys.
Agape cares for just a handful of the many South African children who have lost their parents to HIV/AIDS. Africa is home to 22.5 million of the planet’s 33.2 million AIDS sufferers, and the disease has created 1.2 million orphans in South Africa alone. The orphanage is home to around 45 of them, some as young as 12 months old.
Director Paul Taylor with Slindile Moya.
Perhaps it’s altruism that first drew film student Paul Taylor to leave his Bournemouth University digs in 2003 to volunteer at the home. “The kids are just amazing”, he says. “They’ve gone through such terrible things, but they find positive ways to endure. They sing all the time”. Profoundly moved by the experience, he returned a year later — this time with fellow filmmaker Teddy Leifer, a video camera and an Apple notebook loaded with Final Cut Studio — on a mission to capture the indomitable spirit of the orphans.
Little did the two young filmmakers know they were beginning a four-year journey that would become their central obsession and cost them every penny they had. They received donations from their friends and family, but also ploughed much of their own money into the project. “Initially, we were looking for around £10,000. We managed to raise £6,000 and spent around £12,000”, says Leifer with a rueful smile. Returning each summer for two years, they recorded around 150 hours of footage and fell in love with the children.
The film’s central character, 12 year-old Slindile Moya, was taught to sing by her parents. For her, singing is a way to remember them. Like all the children, she has outstanding vocal talent. Because the children speak Zulu, Teddy and Paul hired Siyabonga as a translator. Watching footage on the Mac, he would type synopses of the rushes during the day while Taylor and Leifer made an early start, leaving with the African sunrise to capture footage with their Sony DSR 570. At sunset, they’d return to base to watch the rushes and ingest them over FireWire. They’d also watch video from the previous day while reading through Siyabonga’s translation.
In one sense, their shoestring budget became an advantage: “We couldn’t afford any more. It had to be what it was, which coincidentally turned out to be the most appropriate set-up for the film”, says Leifer.
“The Mac was incredibly useful. We could ingest footage into Final Cut Pro and cut shots wherever we were”, recalls Taylor. “The fact that our equipment was so mobile gave us so much freedom. In an observational film like this you’re at the mercy of events, and must follow the story where it goes. It helped that I knew the children from being a volunteer before; it meant there wasn’t a barrier between us”.
