It is “Milisuthando”, a film that is the byproduct of the personal and political shock that results from learning that your life has been cooked in a soup of propaganda. It will be in UK cinemas from 18 October.
As part of Snapshot, the year-long touring programme featuring films exploring Black girlhood, made by Black female filmmakers, Tape presents “Milisuthando”, directed, written and narrated by Milisuthando Bongela, in participating UK cinemas nationwide on 18 October.
Milisuthando Bongela’s youth in South Africa was untouched by the horrors, violence, or even the presence of white occupiers. At least that’s how it seemed.
The Republic of Transkei, an unrecognised Black independent region established by the apartheid 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.
The fall of apartheid ushered in a new life, one that included – for the first time – whiteness.
A deeply intimate portrait of past, present and future South Africa, blending poetry, film, and photography into a striking cinematic essay, Milisuthando Bongela explores love, friendship, and belonging in a South Africa stratified by racism – proving that only if we understand its tentacles, can we begin to extricate ourselves from its clutches. Bongela says that “The stories that we often see represented about what it means to be Black during apartheid is that it was a totalising state of awfulness and we were all oppressed in the exact same ways. It’s more complex than that, and to admit that feels risky. But we don’t really engage in the narratives of people who grew up in places like the Bantustans, which complicated the classic view of apartheid.”
In fact, a lot of the evidence of the Bantustans just disappeared. In 1994, the flags were hidden, borders removed, most of our experiences just disappeared. This film is the byproduct of the personal and political shock that results from learning that your life has been cooked in a soup of propaganda.
“Milisuthando”, directed, written and narrated by Milisuthando Bongela, and produced by Marion Isaacs, Milisuthando Bongela, is a 128-minute film, in English and Xhosa with English subtitles. It is worth noting that Tape (founded in 2015 by Angela Moneke and Isra Al Kassi) launched as a response to the lack of representation on screen; wanting to platform and highlight the sheer variety of under-served films out there. And Snapshot is a year-long touring programme featuring films exploring Black girlhood, made by Black female filmmakers.
(Photos supplied by Sarah Harvey, with permission for publication)
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