Film Screening: MILISUTHANDO

Milisuthando Bongela grew up during Apartheid but didn’t know it was happening until it was over. This film, in which she is both the central protagonist and the director, reconstructs that experience and its impact on the years that follow. Startlingly original and making rich use of archival footage and home videos, the film reveals the blurry nature of the boundaries that lie between object and subject, between the personal and the broadly historic, and between the twin fictions of citizen and country. Set in past and present South Africa, including the no-longer existing Transkei, Milisuthando combines a deeply poetic coming-of-age narrative with a complex meditation on power, fear, intimacy, love and race, as well as the ways in which both countries and individual identities are constructed. In the process, she expands the boundaries of the documentary form.