Township Cinderellas ~ AlJaz on SAfrica's Youth

Al Jazeera's Witness spotlights South Africa's challenges in Township Cinderellas, a documentary film by Paul and Sam Sapin...

"...about teenagers from the Cape Flats area of Cape Town in South Africa preparing for their high school graduation ball on the biggest night of their lives. Most of these students were born in 1994, the year Nelson Mandela became president, apartheid ended and South Africa became a democracy. This means that the high school graduating classes of 2011/2012 are the first generation of apartheid-free South Africans. These are 'Mandela’s Children', and they were promised a bright future. But 17 years on from the birth of democracy in South Africa, the outlook for many is far from bright. In the town of Manenberg where we made this film, only a quarter of the children who began school together at Manenberg High School made it to their last year of school and only about 50 per cent of those passed the exams required to graduate."