On screen, Gift Hlahane has seconds.
The robot is red. Cars have stopped around him. He moves between them, working the gap before Johannesburg starts again. A woman catches his attention. Through the glass, he asks where she gets her nails done. She smiles. Then the robot turns green and whatever passed between them is carried away with the traffic.
I am sitting in The Bioscope Independent Cinema on a Sunday afternoon beside my friend Sandra, watching Robots, a documentary about Hlahane’s life at Johannesburg’s traffic lights. Sandra is trying to conceal her sobs, shoulders trembling beside me. I notice, but Hlahane’s story has pulled me so completely into the screen that my attention keeps returning to him.
Over the last few days, this remarkable documentary has also been on the film-festival circuit in Vermont for the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival, where Robots was selected from 566 submissions. Hlahane, who has learnt to make a connection in the brief pause between red and green, will now have another 65 minutes.
The gift of meeting Gift
Not long after seeing the film I travel with its Sri Lankan director, Yaseen J. Khan, to Daveyton to meet Hlahane. The questions Robots has left with me follow us there, and I am keen to understand what years at Johannesburg’s traffic lights have taught the man himself about the people inside the cars.
“They can understand body language,” he says.
Hlahane reads eyes and expressions. He knows when someone might respond or wants him gone. Sometimes he sees women crying, tries to make them smile and asks what happened.
Until then, the windscreen had seemed to place the looking in one direction. I looked out, made my small private judgements, then drove on when the robot changed. Sitting with Hlahane, I see through the glass from the other side. I had thought I was watching him, but all along, he had been watching me too.
Another insight emerges across my conversations with both men. Khan tells me he is more at ease behind a camera, where he can listen for hours. Hlahane describes almost the opposite. Put a camera in front of him and he comes alive. “Let me do my thing,” he tells me. One man found his place behind the lens, the other in front of it. Somewhere between them is where Robots finds its intimacy.
For more than two years, Khan and his production team followed Hlahane. Filming at the robots brought them into the traffic with him. Khan remembers the heat on his head and cars passing close enough to feel “the breeze hitting my ears”.
When filming stops, he can step away. Hlahane returns the next day.
Khan wanted viewers to “empathise with his position, but not feel sorry for him”.
Hlahane makes pity difficult.
“I’m the happiest man on earth,” he tells me that morning in Daveyton, tracing that happiness back to his children. They are also why he keeps returning. Some days the robots yield nothing. The following morning, he goes back.
The more Hlahane tells me about those red-light minutes, the more weight that small stretch of road begins to carry.
Johannesburg places Hlahane’s life directly beside mine, beside Sandra’s, close enough to touch through an open window.
Perhaps the stranger thing is how familiarity can make that proximity easier to stop seeing.
Resilience and hope
Khan calls Hlahane “a reflection of South Africa”, speaking of the resilience and hope he sees in the way Hlahane moves through hardship. His words stay with me for another reason. I think of what else sits inside that reflection, those of us behind the glass, seeing Hlahane often enough that one day he risks becoming part of what we expect the road to contain.
Middlebury producer Lloyd Komesar calls Robots “a small gem”. At the end of August, a man accustomed to catching someone’s eye through a windscreen will occupy a cinema screen thousands of kilometres away. And an audience will sit with him long after the traffic light would have turned green.
When I ask Hlahane what he hopes someone watching his story might recognise about their life, he does not answer by asking them to understand his. “You are blessed,” he says. “Don’t forget about those who aren’t.”
A community screening programme for Robots will be announced in September; details to follow on the film’s social channels.