Milisuthando

Filmmaker, writer, and poet Milisuthando Bongela’s youth in South Africa was untouched by the horrors of apartheid—at least that’s how it seemed. The Transkei, an unrecognized Black independent region established by the regime, created the illusion for Black South Africans that separate could be equal. And paradoxically for Bongela, life in the Transkei proved as idyllic as the propaganda claimed. Until it was over. The fall of apartheid ushered in a new life, one that included, for the first time, whiteness. Milisuthando is a deeply intimate portrait of past, present, and future South Africa, blending poetry, film, and photography into a striking cinematic essay.

Curators’ Note:
“Milisuthando Bongela traces their life alongside the history of the “independent” Transkei of apartheid South Africa, their dissolution and the creation of a nationalistic South African identity. Taking a relational approach, they examine their life, that of those close to them and those affected by this history to understand the contemporary realities of South Africa shaped by the context of colonial violence.”

African Cinema Now! runs on Tuesdays and Saturdays through the second half of June.

Bongela’s film is haunted by the disorientation and the guilt that result from this experience of growing up inside an apartheid experiment yet remaining blissfully unaware of its horrors […] Painful as it is, the film is also lovingly bookended by the burning of impepho, a ritual of communicating with one’s ancestors. Here is cinema as a form of communion that reaches through time and space.

4 stars, Phuong Le, The Guardian