Awards (click to collapse)
Stone Award 2002 – Best Film (2002) – Winner: Best Film
This unobtrusive gem, formerly titled Bread & Water, is an inspiring yet unsentimental account of service delivery in action, which somehow acquires the force of a parable. In Sicambeni village, near Port St Johns, there is no electricity or running water. Villagers have to walk miles to a contaminated water source, and disease is rife. Then a bakkie piled high with blue pipes arrives, and their lives are changed forever. The film charts their increasing excitement tinged with scepticism as the pipe trench begins to snake through their fields – their hopes for the future growing with it. In the end, a single tap comes to symbolise prayers finally answered. Paradoxically, it also opens their eyes to possibilities beyond the village, to a world where they are no longer hewers of wood and drawers of water.
