Set in past, present, and future South Africa, Milisuthando is an invitation into a poetic, memory-driven exploration of love, intimacy, race, and belonging by the filmmaker, who grew up during apartheid but didn't know it was happening until it was over.

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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.

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Written and Directed by Milisuthando Bongela
Produced by Marion Isaacs and Milisuthando Bongela
Cinematography and editing by Hankyeol Lee
Co-Produced by Viviana Gómez Echeverry and Sonia Barrera Gutiérrez
Executive Producers: Jessica Devaney, Anya Rous, Charlotte Cook, Brenda Robinson and D.D. Wigley
Co-Executive Producer: The Dobkin Family Foundation