Shot Down is a South African feature film directed by Andrew Worsdale and written by Worsdale with Matthew Krouse, Robert Colman, Giulio Biccari and Jeremy Nathan. It was shot in Johannesburg, Durban and Marikana, and completed in 1986. The plot concerns a character called Paul Gilliat, a two-bit South African movie maker who arrives back in the country in darkest days of apartheid. Here he gets recruited by the security police to hunt down a major black activist who heads a militant theatre group. For cover, Paul falls in with radical white political theatre satirists, and learns in the process how to love, as well as some moral lessons about life. The film stars, among others, the late James Philips who was the country’s Jim Morrison figure at the time. It was banned shortly after its completion under the draconian censorship laws of the time.
