Cross-genre aesthetics in Zimbabwe’s HIV orphans cinema: Realism, ideation and subject matter in fiction and documentary filmmaking

The article examines the documentary Zimbabwe’s Forgotten Children: A Struggle for Survival (2010) and the narrative film Everyone’s Child (1996) for similarities in depicting Zimbabwean orphans and vulnerable children. The article uses these two case studies to discuss intra-genre possibilities in documentary and fiction cinema’s approaches to filmmaking. It shows that while the actual events filmed are different, and the films belong to different genres, they share similarities in their organizing idea, storytelling techniques and characterization. The article tries to make sense of the films’ comparable verisimilitude to the historical realities of childhood and the HIV pandemic in Zimbabwe. In doing so, it demonstrates the need to rethink genre, not necessarily by dismissing existing conventions but by examining what intra-diegetic commonalities may exist at the levels of realism and verisimilitude, organizing ideas and subject matter.