Everything Must Fall: The High Cost of Free Education. 2018. 1hr 25 min. English. South Africa, Netherlands, Belgium. Uhuru Productions and Kittina media, Story House and ICONdocs. No price reported.

Desai Rehad., dir. Everything Must Fall: The High Cost of Free Education. 2018. 1hr 25 min. English. South Africa, Netherlands, Belgium. Uhuru Productions and Kittina media, Story House and ICONdocs. No price reported.

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 under-resourced Black institutions on the urban peripheries and rural hinterlands. These so-called Black universities absorbed a pool of poorly-prepared 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...