Walk With Angels

Despite the stereotypes that circulate about the continent in the global North, Africa is not one-dimensional. It consists not only of images of poverty, disease, hunger and war to which the media has accustomed us, but above all of a mosaic of various cultures and people. People who are sometimes hard to reach, understand and to gain the trust of. As tourists, we rarely see their true faces. As heirs of the colonisers, our look is often patronising, even if it is not a conscious gaze. Tomasz Wysoki?ski, an experienced idealist traveler, managed to enter a world usually closed to whites.

Walk With Angels is a poetic, documentary record of the collective – tragic and wronged – memory of the people of Johannesburg. Wysoki?ski travels around the capital of South Africa, scratching old wounds, recalling the ghosts of the past and observing those places that bear its stigma, as if time had stopped. Indeed, South Africa continues to suffer: children are regularly abducted, young people live a bleak street life, and memories and traces of apartheid lurk around every corner. Jeremaiah Marobyane is a guide on the winding roads of broken memory – courageously entering the heart of darkness deeper and deeper in a search of a girl who went missing a few years ago.

The Polish director creates a gloomy, menacing atmosphere, which is emphasised not only by shocking images, as if Johannesburg was a battlefield after a bloody war, but also by Pawe? Mykietyn's music which causes goosebumps. Wysoki?ski suggests through the voice of Marobyane that the responsibility for the disease affecting the collective South African memory lies with former colonisers. But one gets the impression that his film is also a kind of creation, an artistic look from the perspective of a Westerner. Despite the fact that the presence of the camera seems neutral, and the protagonists of the film treat it indifferently, one can feel the artificiality and discomfort of incompatibility with a completely different world.

The Polish documentary filmmaker avoids the mistakes of tourists, travellers and vloggers, holding back from cultural colonisation, instead trying to give voice to his heroes – but his mystical gaze is closer to mystics from the Christian West than to the spirits of Africa. When the guide says that he is not afraid to go to the heart of darkness, because he is seeking help from the Angels, he may be unknowingly citing the authority of the camera. What if Walk With Angels is indeed a walk with Angels, but white-skinned and fallen?