Yizo Yizo: This is it!

Yizo Yizo represents a dramatic departure for African television. In their effort to create an uncompromisingly tough and realistic look at the volatile situation in South African schools, directors Angus Gibson and Teboho Mahlatsi have developed a filmic vocabulary that is alive to the rhythms and patterns of township life. It tackles the questions of poverty, violence, rape, drug abuse and corruption head-on. Yizo Yizo is set at Supatsela High, a township school with a good reputation. This reflects the efforts of its stríct and conservative principal, Mr. Mthembu, to make the most of the limited resources at its disposal. It soon becomes clear, however, that his authoritarian style holds together by force a situation that is fundamentally unsound, and the school and its community begin to widen. The narrative of Supatsela's passage from an artificially imposed coherence, through dissolution to the emergence of a new and differently constituted order, emerges out of the complex interactions of the learners, their families, the teaching staff and educational authorities.