US + CANADA
Exclusive Streaming Premiere
The Criterion Channel
Exclusive Streaming Premiere
The Criterion Channel
AFRICA
Rent on Vimeo or Patreon
watch.milisuthando.com
Rent on Vimeo or Patreon
watch.milisuthando.com
Dates: 13 October & 15 October 2025
Venue: Neelsie Cinema
Hosts: Woordfees Film Festival
Cape Town, South Africa
Durban, South Africa
Date: 17 October 2025
Venue: The Chairman
Hosts: Lit Social Club
Gqeberha, South Africa
Date: 30 October 2025
Venue: AFDA Gqeberha
Host: AFDA Gqeberha
Bloemfontein, South Africa
Date: 1 November 2025
Venue: 56 Tambo Arts Centre
Host: CineBa
Date: 22 October 2025
Venue: Cinemateket + The Royal Danish Academy
Host: Heirloom Centre for Art and Archives - Remnants curated by Tawanda Appiah
Nairobi, Kenya
Date: 1 November 2025
Venue: Unseen
Host: Unseen Theatre
Barcelona, Spain
Date: 23 November 2025
Venue: TBC
Host: Build Peace Conference
Promotional posters for Milisuthando, photographs by Hankyeol Lee & Adrian Fortuin, designed by francis burger with Milisuthando Bongela, 2023 & 2025.
About the film
Our story exists on two parallel planes.
the plane of the tangible and the plane of the intangible.
myth and fact are husband and wife.
tale and memory, siblings.
and history, the bed they can't wake up from.
we begin and end in an embrace with The Ancestors.
and in between, traverse the liminal spaces
between sky and ground
being and race
other and self
linear and nonlinear time
life and death
Africa and the west.
this is a portrait of me and South Africa,
growing up together
in the aftermath of apartheid
and unfolds over 5 acts and
3 universes spanning 3 decades.
at times using the medium of cinema as a tool to perform ritual.
driven by my narrative voice,
Honed in the hearth of uBuntu,
in pursuit of the anatomy of race in this place,
with a view of my own fragile personhood,
the film is concerned with the notion that:
something was done, to all of us.
and meditates on difficult questions about power, intimacy, fear, refusal, duty, repair and love.
this pursuit is at times observational,
at times vérité, traversing
happened-upon environments that take the viewer
into the interiors of the new South Africa,
via the histories that inconveniently bond us
to one another.