‘Milisuthando’ Offers a Timely Take on Intimacy and Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Hot Docs Forum

variety.com:

Christopher Vourlias An award-winning writer, blogger and editor whose work centers on the post-apartheid condition from the perspective of Black, middle-class South Africans and women, Milisuthando Bongela is making her directorial debut with a coming-of-age story that she’s pitching this week at the Hot Docs Forum.“Milisuthando” is a meditation on power, intimacy, difference, and the weight of loving and fearing your enemy in a time of decolonization.

Directed by Bongela, the film is produced by Marion Isaacs for The Good Black Project (South Africa), in co-production with Sonia Barrera and Viviana Gómez Echeverry of Viso Producciones (Colombia), with Jessica Devaney and Anya Rous of Multitude Films attached to executive produce.

Bongela was born and raised in the republic of Transkei, one of the Bantustans or “homelands” set aside for Black inhabitants by South Africa’s apartheid government.

Nominally independent, Transkei residents had a distinct experience of the years in which the rest of the country was operating under white-minority rule. “We lived in a beautiful house on a lovely street with Sotho people, Xhosa people, white people, people from Ghana, people from Uganda,” Bongela recalled. “I grew up inside apartheid, under apartheid, but didn’t know it was happening.”With South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, which put an end to nearly 50 years of apartheid, the Transkei was absorbed into a country optimistically striving to become a “Rainbow Nation.” Bongela and her family moved to the coastal city of East London, where she became part of the first generation of Black South Africans to be integrated into formerly white-only spaces.“We were children when apartheid ended, and so we were the first.