Everything Must Fall: The High Cost of Free Education dir. by Rehad Desai (review)

Before 1994, South African universities were structurally aligned with the apartheid grammar of racial separation and extreme inequality, an ugly dichotomy of well-resourced white institutions in the cities and underresourced Black institutions on the urban peripheries and rural hinterlands. These so-called Black universities absorbed a pool of poorlyprepared Black learners, products of an equally inferior system of primary and secondary schooling. In many ways, the vestiges of inequality still hold. After 1994, Black students were allowed to enroll in formerly white universities. According to the Report of the Ministerial Committee for the Review of the Funding of Universities (2014), between 1994 and 2011, student enrolments in the entire higher education system almost doubled, from 495,356 to 938,201. While this reflected democratized access in contrast to the past, it also unmasked other problems, as many students could not complete their undergraduate education due to lack of funds. State subsidies also gradually decreased, which virtually made universities engines of their own financial stability. The universities increased tuition fees, leading to the financial exclusion of poorer students. These were strong motivating factors for a swell in student anger, culminating in a huge call for a moratorium on fees and eventually for free higher education.

The flag bearer of this call was a movement called Fees Must Fall (sometimes #FeesmustFall, or #FMF), an alliance of progressive student bodies, principally the African National Congress-aligned Progressive Youth Alliance and the Economic Freedom Fighters Youth Command, a student wing of the Economic Freedom Fighters party. When the outgoing State President Jacob Zuma announced in late 2017 that poor students would thenceforth get access to free education in higher institutions, the movement had achieved one of its key demands. The formation, consolidation, demise, and aftermath of the Fees Must Fall movement is the principal subject of the film Everything Must Fall. Its director, Rehad Desai, is most widely known for Miners Shot Down (2014), the documentary film on the police massacre of mine workers in South Africa's platinum belt. Everything Must Fall is his latest contribution to a growing oeuvre that covers flash points of post-apartheid South Africa's national life.

The inauguration of Professor Adam Habib, the first Black person of Indian descent to be vice chancellor and principal of Wits University, introduces the film. Habib extols the virtues of the university and strikes a conciliatory tone "to those we might have done wrong by." Immediately after the footage of his speech, the viewer is confronted with a critical viewpoint by former student leader Leigh-Ann Naidoo, who makes clear the university's white patriarchal structure and cultural alignments with Cambridge University. This sets up the bias for a balance of opinion in the film, from there it switches between explication by the vice chancellor and counterpoints by students who repudiate the culture of the university.

Considered as a unit, the inauguration, Naidoo's counterpoint, and archival footage of Wits university form the backdrop to a film that starts properly with a provocative title track and the university's announcement of a 10.5 percent increase in tuition fees. The inclusion of the announcement, its being edited to be the first historical act against which the students rise, makes it an inciting incident of the film—a code borrowed from narrative fiction film. At the same time as it sets up the confrontation between the students and the vice chancellor as the film's central plank, the incident also determines the narrational structure of the film. A semi-sequential timeline of the movement—October 2015 to October 2016—underpins this structure. Alongside the timeline, student leaders, a worker, and the university lecturers express their opinions and analyses of the protests and the institutional culture against which they were set. Wits University, the setting of the interviews, is the institution from which all the student leaders who were...