Mil­isuthando review – an inti­mate, nuanced cine-essay

Mil­isuthando Bongela’s sprawl­ing, self-titled doc­u­men­tary is divid­ed into five dis­tinct parts, each with a unique sense of direc­tion. For­mal­ly, the film as a whole cir­cum­vents the need for a struc­ture to con­tain its con­stituent parts. Poet­ry, archive mate­r­i­al, col­lec­tive mem­o­ry, spir­i­tu­al­i­ty, per­son­al his­to­ries and mem­oir are com­bined to make up a strik­ing cine-essay fore­ground­ed by Bongela’s lived expe­ri­ence as a black South African woman, and a desire to inter­ro­gate the dialec­tic ten­sion between ​“nation” and ​“self”.

“The street I grew up in had no name, and is in a coun­try that no longer exists”, Bon­gela explains in her poet­ic nar­ra­tion, switch­ing between Eng­lish and Xhosa. Her back­ground as a writer tru­ly shines, lend­ing a lyri­cal tone to the film’s explo­ration of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and rad­i­cal hon­esty. She was born in 1985 in the Transkei, a Ban­tus­tan estab­lished in 1976 by the South African apartheid régime as the first nom­i­nal­ly inde­pen­dent ​“black home­land” for the Xhosa peo­ple. The state would remain inter­na­tion­al­ly unrecog­nised and diplo­mat­i­cal­ly iso­lat­ed for its 18-year exis­tence as a colo­nial test­ing ground for the illu­sion that racial seg­re­ga­tion was the right path to equality.

For a young Bon­gela, grow­ing up sur­round­ed only by a black com­mu­ni­ty in a place devoid of ​“whites only” bench­es and dogs that were trained only to bark at black peo­ple, that illu­sion felt real and would only rear its ugly head upon the dis­so­lu­tion of bor­ders and her family’s relo­ca­tion to the mixed city of East Lon­don. From that point on, Bon­gela must reck­on with the apartheid régime in its direct after­math, com­ing with the real­i­sa­tion that her generation’s lived expe­ri­ence through­out the exis­tence of Transkei was at the core of the régime’s ​“sor­did exper­i­ment”, with com­mu­ni­ties being forced to build a liveli­hood inside its bowels.

Com­bin­ing a trea­sure trove of archive footage, home movies and per­son­al pho­tographs to tell the his­to­ry of the Transkei, Mil­isuthando is also a clear love let­ter to the filmmaker’s own fam­i­ly. We hear from her grand­moth­er as she reflects on lin­ger­ing wounds, speaks effu­sive­ly about the Transkei, and even blames Nel­son Man­dela for its dis­so­lu­tion. There’s a lot here about the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of liv­ing out­side the struc­tur­al vio­lence of apartheid, the com­pli­cat­ed nature of a mis­placed nos­tal­gia, and the impos­si­bil­i­ty to reach towards a col­lec­tive black his­to­ry and mem­o­ry that hasn’t been defined in rela­tion to white­ness. Bon­gela real­ly leans into these com­plex­i­ties with great nuance.

The film’s fourth chap­ter is made up almost entire­ly of a voiceover accom­pa­nied by a blank screen, where a heat­ed exchange about white priv­i­lege between Bon­gela and her close white friend, Mar­i­on Isaacs, who is the film’s pro­duc­er, takes place. It’s a bold choice that doesn’t entire­ly pay off, stunt­ing the momen­tum built over the film’s first half. So much of the film is ground­ed by such a strong sub­jec­tive posi­tion, and shift­ing the focus in this way to point towards the rever­ber­a­tions of white vio­lence feels abrupt. Still, it does work in exem­pli­fy­ing the polit­i­cal under­cur­rents of rela­tion­al pow­er dynam­ics, and stress­ing that the per­son­al is always political.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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