Romy Titus’s project of the heart becomes a documentary
The word “prison” hardly brings to mind heavily pregnant women, babies and restless toddlers. However, expectant women can be sentenced to prison and after the children’s birth, they may remain behind bars with their mothers until they are two years old.
The well-known sports presenter and radio and television personality, Romy Titus, first realized the gravity of this situation as a young journalist for eNews in 2000. Her news editor sent her to the Johannesburg Correctional Center to report on a Christmas party. What she found there changed her life irrevocably.
During a radio interview on CliffCentral, Romy told Gareth Cliff how this Christmas party shook her to her core. There were about 30 women in the meagerly decorated mother and child unit, with a single Winnie the Pooh hanging gloomily on the wall and only one small cream cake for everyone to share. Even worse: The female prisoners had to make do with only one bathroom and toilet and some of them had to sleep two by two on single beds.
Romy could not get this experience out of her mind. Nor the horrific story she covered about a baby in Dube, Soweto. Unlike the baby whose head lay to one side of a street, she knew there was still hope for the innocent little children behind bars. She had to do something concrete to help them. She established the non-profit organization Babies Behind Bars in 2007, which has been assisting mothers and children in prisons across South Africa and beyond our national borders ever since.
With the Silwerskerm Festival documentary Born Behind Bars, Romy and her film crew take us over the high walls and behind the heavy iron doors of the Johannesburg Correctional Center to the mother and child unit. In the midst of the anxiety, isolation and anger that prevails there, we get to know a prison mother more closely. Morwesi Theledi was sentenced to ten years in prison during her second trimester of pregnancy, where she had to give birth to her baby boy under humiliating circumstances.
Shooting a documentary behind bars was obviously an enormous responsibility. “Trust in any relationship is important, but if you could measure trust on the day we filmed in the prison, there was a mountain of trust on my shoulders,” says Romy.
“Apart from the trust of the guards and that of the film crew whose equipment was carried back and forth through the prison, there was also that of the people in the women’s unit whose space we invaded. And also, that of Morwesi. Her story is so fragile, and therefore also so powerful.”
Morwesi’s story teaches one the true meaning of gratitude and freedom, and the importance of making the right choices.
Born Behind Bars, with Romy Titus in the director’s chair, premières at the Silwerskerm Festival at 11:30 on Friday, 25 Augustus, and will be available on kykNET and Showmax thereafter.