Interrogations of the past fuse profoundly with investment in the future in this kaleidoscopic look at apartheid through its victims and the filmmaker’s own self.
Director: Milisuthando Bongela
Runtime: 128
Fest Year: 2023
Filmmaker Milisuthando Bongela grew up in the Transkei—an 18-year-long pro-apartheid, Black separatist territory that dissolved with Nelson Mandela’s liberation and presidency. In her self-titled debut, Milisuthando, she works across political, personal, and spiritual dimensions to explore ancestry, power, and the construction of race and racism in the context of the South African apartheid regime, which Bongela was unaware she was growing up inside of until it was over. Milisuthando questions rigidity in both the world it depicts and the way it depicts it. The film employs a gentle narration moving seamlessly between English and Xhosa, as it deals in poetry and open wounds, over visuals that move effortlessly back and forth between formats, archives, and time, and boldly include complex conversations about race between Black and white friends. Milisuthando challenges the notion that in life—or in cinema—there is any separation between the personal and the political. (KS)