In South Africa, it is more than ethnic groups that are cruelly controlled; media, too, falls under the mantle of government suppression. So it is significant that The Varan Workshop, a multi-racial video collective, even exists. This Johannesburg-based group, comprised of twelve men and women, has slipped the yoke of apartheid to record daily life with a non-sensational honesty rarely seen in officially sanctioned news reports. South African Chronicles is a compilation of nine short works that peer into the hearts of the people on both sides of the race barrier. Perhaps the most incendiary moments take place at a meeting of the right-wing Afrikaner Resistance Movement. Replete with Neo-Nazi pagaentry, the A.R.M. advocates strict enforcement of apartheid, basing its platform on nostalgia for a colonial past. This extremist position is echoed by interviews with common Boers who-though more mild in their opinions-also resist change. Captured in a non-critical style, the segments depicting the life of South African whites share a common backdrop, that of material comfort. This is very different from the shanty- town poverty of Soweto where elderly blacks wait in a dusty field for their pension checks, or sickly patients sit in the gloom of an overcrowded health-care center relying on volunteer doctors. South African Chronicles depicts the reality of apartheid without the scolding rage or moralizing discourse that often accompanies such media investigations. But when we look at the black and the white of these images, the injustice makes itself known.--Steve Seid