Thriving through the lens of memory
- Chanté Schatz
Imagine this: you’re in a dark cinema, the screen flickers, and a family’s story begins to unravel…
Faces you’ll never forget, homes left behind, memories pieced together like shards of glass. You lean in, feeling both close and distant, as if you’re witnessing someone else’s life, but somehow, it feels like your own. This is the world of Professor Tanja Sakota, where film, memory and emotion meet.
Feelings about film
For Sakota, Associate Professor and Deputy Head of the School of Arts, storytelling isn’t just an academic pursuit, it’s a lifeline, a lens through which we navigate memory, trauma and resilience. At the heart of her work lies emotion. For her, filmmaking blurs the boundaries between documentary and fiction, emphasising character, memory and the human experience.
“Filmmaking is emotional. You cannot differentiate yourself from that. Each character has a backstory, emotions and the filmmaking process taps into these, not just for the character, but for the audience too.”
Sakota has been at Wits for over two decades. “I’m a proper Witsie, through and through,” she says. “It’s in my blood and veins.” Her journey into storytelling began as a Wits student in theatre but it was when she majored in Film and Television that she found her calling.
Watching footage of civilian casualties during the Gulf War, she realised the power of images and the responsibility that comes with them. “We were watching what looked like a video game but there were real civilian casualties. That search for truth sparked my research trajectory,” she recalls.
Centring the Self
In her experimental award-winning documentary Shattered Reflection, spanning four generations, she traces her family’s forced migration to South Africa after the Second World War. “I use my own experiences of grief and loss to navigate their stories,” she says. The film opens with a line that hits like a punch: ‘How do you face another day when your heart is broken?’
The sudden loss of her 18-year-old daughter in 2020 became a catalyst for Sakota’s pull towards this autoethnography, a method of research that places the self at the centre of inquiry. “When you experience trauma at that level, your life is shattered. You can’t just pick up the pieces, you have to recreate something different, like a mosaic. Autoethnography allowed me to navigate my own emotions and make sense of the stories within my family, across generations.”
Unlike traditional research, which looks from the outside in, this method places personal experience at the centre. Her book Uncovering Memory complements the film, blending theory with narrative to explore grief, resilience and intergenerational memory.
This blending of personal reflection and narrative is part of her teaching. 足球竞彩app排名s are encouraged to explore their own agency, vulnerability and resilience through documentary and fiction. Sakota describes a course where students create three-minute films drawing from their personal experiences and interactions with Johannesburg. One group traced a long-lost uncle who had witnessed the Marikana massacre, while others chronicled the lives of women who worked in mines or family members who achieved extraordinary success against the odds. “When you understand vulnerability and risk within yourself, it becomes much easier to translate that when you interact with others,” she explains.
Thriving courageously
Sakota sees thriving as the outcome of this process, a combination of agency, resilience and the courage to engage with both personal and collective histories. Her approach emphasises that we cannot erase the past but we can interact with it thoughtfully, using memory and creativity through the lens to forge strength. Poetry, she notes, allowed her to voice difficult emotions when language was insufficient, while filmmaking enabled her to translate the five senses into visual narrative, combining interviews, voiceovers and cinematic imagery.
In a world still marked by trauma, inequality and shifting political tensions, Sakota’s work suggests that thriving is not about turning away from pain but engaging with it openly, creatively and with courage. Through narrative, memory and emotion, her research shows how people can make sense of their histories and find the tools to rebuild, to question and to shape spaces where resilience can take root.
- Chanté Schatz is Multimedia Communications Officer at Wits University and CURIOSI.TY Picture Editor
- This article first appeared in?CURIOS.TY,?a research magazine produced by?Wits Communications?and the?Research Office.
- Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.