Sundance Film Festival 2023: Milisuthando (World Cinema Documentary Competition) Review
Milisuthando, the impressive feature debut by Milisuthando Bongela, reflects on the director’s ancestry of Transkei, a state of South African that no longer exists.
The opening shot of Milisuthando Bongela’s debut feature, Milisuthando, shows the events of July 28, 2014, where an unidentified woman undresses in front of a statue of Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg. This viral video, shot on a cell phone, mysterious as it is, contains Milisuthando’s question of identity, womanhood, and the past all in one strange, but powerful moment.
In her film, premiering in the World Documentary Competition at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Milisuthando, or Mili explores and questions her non-existent province of Transkei in South Africa. As part of an experiment lead by white colonizers of South Africa to implement apartheid, history and oneself becomes lost through history, racism, and culture that affects and questions the present. Using never seen archival footage, from either the apartheid government records, Mili structures a filmic essay that poetically questions power through memory.
Going through the many strands affected by her home countries history, Milisuthando unveils a portrait of herself exploited through colonialism and false promises through apartheid. Through many viewpoints and perspectives, Mili’s storytelling maneuvers from the beginning of her childhood to present day. Milisuthando uses many forms of documentary filmmaking such as voiceovers, archival footage, and interviews. Bongela structures them in an analytical and persuasive intent, questioning herself and the viewers of this history that was allowed to happen and its cascading effects.
Her use of archival footage lays out the many contradictions and false promises from the apartheid regime. By allowing the “independence” of the indigenous community, that idea was used against them violently, causing many deaths eventually leading to the immigration of Mili’s family to the United Kingdom. She then explores the lives of the emigrated now in the UK, exposed to racism, cultural differences, and power struggles. Lastly, the film dives into conversations between Bongela and her friends where whiteness and its history has unconsciously have them use microaggressions towards Bongela. In a lengthy scene with only dialogue over a black screen, Mili and her producer Marion get into a heated discussion how her niceness was used as a form of control. The everlasting effect from the Transkei is past down, making the sum of all events, who Mili is, as a human.
What is so intriguing about Milisuthando in its core is identity and the complacent racism instituted today from history. Whether it is using its archival footage juxtaposing how whites and blacks were treated in South Africa to its climatic conversations about white guilt where it is built in you unconsciously. One may ask themselves who is not in a position of to re-evaluate perspective. It is through Mili’s personal expansive filmmaking and background; one can contemplate and reflect on history and perception of race. Milisuthando captures how the history of her home, which is no exists, creates the human she is, and all of the Transkei community.
