Review: Under the Rainbow (2002)

Directed by: Dean Blumberg | 18 minutes | short film, documentary

The short film ‘Under the Rainbow’ starts with the message that one hundred and sixty-five security cameras are monitoring an area of ​​thirty kilometers. The cameras record about 100,000 stories from Johannesburg residents every day. This is one story. As a viewer you are immediately stimulated by this information and you are curious about the course of the film, which is made from an original point of view. A film made in this way requires good editing. The director must have thought this too. Dean Blumberg therefore quickly abandons the originality when he also inserts images that were not made by security cameras. Apparently not everything is properly registered by the security cameras.

What remains is the story: the survival instinct of two boys in the streets of Johannesburg. The boys are friends and have different characters. One is a dreamer who wants to be a famous dancer someday. He even claims to be able to dance without hearing music. What follows is a dance, which unfortunately is provided with music by the filmmaker. The other has no more dreams and lives from day to day. He indicates that the city (humanity) will never change. Only the population will continue to increase in number.

When one of the boys commits a brutal murder, the film suddenly takes a different turn. The sympathy generated at first turns resolutely into antipathy. The so-called friendship gives way to the harsh reality in which everyone is for himself. There is no room for compassion. The filmmaker realistically shows that cities like Johannesburg are ravaged by crimes that are brutally committed without rancor. There is a vicious circle in which violence is no solution to this problem.