Trending | A documentary about 73-year-old instructor Sensei Togieda Flowers and her six-year-old student training in Cape Town is an intimate portrait of commitment and self-mastery across generations
Martial arts films were a global sensation during the 1970s and 1980s, when heroes were made and emulated. Across racially, economically and culturally segregated South Africa – in the fashion of Bruce Lee, Karate Kid’s Daniel and Mr Miyagi, and Chuck Norris – people raised their arms to their sides, lifted a single bent leg to waist height and flung out kicks to within inches of someone’s face while exclaiming in a high-pitched voice. They emulated the stars of martial arts movies.
So far, the film has been shown at the Muestra Itinerante de Cine Africano Festival, the NY Portuguese Short Film Festival and the Encounters South African International Documentary Festival.As the film plays out, a six-year-old student at the Surrey Estate dojo, Nawar Taliep, becomes both a co-star and a frame for the film. Sara de Gouveia and Jessie Zinn co-directed Like Water with the clear intention of placing these characters at its centre.
“All of a sudden, there is this beautiful girl who is full of energy. She is kind of interested, but also not interested in karate. She’s just a little bit too young to even get it. And there was something beautiful about that energy and how you shape it into a karateka. We started imagining that it would be interesting to see the story from her point of view.”Like Water plays up the age difference between Flowers and Nawar.
“It was really like a sparkle in our karate life because we were a karate family,” Flowers says. “Mom, dad and daughter doing it. As the years went, we excelled because we were in an underprivileged area where they needed some sport. I don’t think that there was [any] sport at the time. Nazeem died in 1992 and Flowers was not only left to raise their young daughter and a one-year-old son. “I had to take over the training,” she says. “I needed to gather all my knowledge and experience while he was there and I had to give it over. I was not a student anymore. I was an instructor. It wasn’t a very easy journey for me. I kept on because my training was my life.
The early stages of Flowers’ karate journey was met with resistance from her mother, who saw martial arts as something women should not do. “You can imagine how my mother went ballistic thinking, ‘I’m taking my little girl also to do this martial art.’ As years went by, she realised that I was involved in this martial art of defence and with the crime and the ill happenings to females, I think she had a change of mind.
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