South African filmmaker Milisuthando Bongela has long been a student of language and beauty. “My parents got me a diary when I was a kid—I think it’s because I used to ask a lot of questions,” she says between laughter. Bongela is clad in an all-white overcoat, broad glasses, and a fresh buzz cut. She speaks to me enthusiastically from Park City as she attends the 2023 Sundance Film Festival in of her eponymous, debut documentary Milisuthando. 

I ask Bongela, who is surrounded by film creatives and billowy pillows of piled snow, how it feels to be at Sundance. “My head is cold,” she laughs. It’s a long haul from South Africa to Utah; the filmmaker contented herself with getting emotional over Marcel the Shell with Shoes On during her flight. “I was like, yes, I love the film so much, I’m so happy. I was crying like an idiot!” Together, we talk about the prayer she had made that morning in response to a feeling of imposter syndrome, a prayer that gave her the conviction that “I’m walking in here with my ancestors. I’m not alone.” 

Milisuthando is at its heart a cinematic exploration of Bongela’s relationship to the Transkei, an 18-year long, pro-apartheid, Black separatist territory within South Africa, the first of four states of its kind. The Transkei dissolved in 1994 when Nelson Mandela was released from prison and ascended to the presidency. With that state dissolution, Bongela and other Black youth born and raised within the Transkei were forced to perceive themselves under racialized lenses and conceptions that they had previously been largely unburdened by. Through Milisuthando, Bongela occupies the liminal space between poetry and visual language, splicing archival footage, scenic landscapes and song into a personal essay documentary about her memories of home. 

Introducing her audience to the Transkei, Bongela powerfully narrates: “The street I grew up on does not have a name, in a country that no longer exists”. I was curious about why Bongela and her collaborators decided to take this poetic approach, to rupture expectations around the voice at the heart of the film. 

“I’ve always been somebody to quote this one poet, John O’Donohue, who hung on words like, like I’m just there. I don’t think I ever was gonna do it the other way. We did try to do the whole narrating thing where everything’s a lot more ‘on this date, this is what happened, this is what the Model C school is’. And I was like, ‘This is not my voice. This is not how I sound. This is not how I write.’ I feel there is room for poetry. I wouldn't say it’s soft because it’s penetrating, you know, it’s sharp in its own way.”

On the power of poetry, Bongela shares, “poetry is something that becomes undeniable, when it’s true. It penetrates even if you don’t agree with it. Even if you don’t like it. The first thing is to respect language. Actually, respect the tongue and what the tongue does as a form of creation, as a form of incantation. Literally creating the future: it starts when it’s spoken.” 

As neat as it might be to understand apartheid as an interpersonally corrosive system of racial hierarchy and economic exploitation that has been legally abolished within South Africa, Bongela’s film encourages viewers to consider the plurality of Black identities (Xhosa-speakers, Sotho speakers, and so on) within this hierarchy. 

By placing pressure on the conflation of Black identities within South Africa, Bongela illuminates the various ways Black South Africans pursued their varied definitions of liberation under apartheid—and how their descendants live with those definitions now. In the film, Bongela refers to this cognitive dissonance as “the life long homework of questioning your foundation.” 

She herself wasn’t aware of the existence of the Transkei while living within it. She tells me that she didn’t know, for example, about people from other parts of Africa being essentially imported to Transkei to help build the new, independent nation—including West African migrants deported from Nigeria. “So I grew up in a Pan-African place, except no one explains to you what it is. You just had your childhood, you know. And that’s why it was so important to tell because if it was a shock to me, and I’m from there, how much shock is it to the rest of the world?”

The use of the personal essay and poetry allows Bongela to ascribe lived experience, family , memory, flesh to the bones of complicated and seemingly resolved histories. Among her greatest feelings of pride regarding the creative process? The dense library of sound she and editor Hankyeol Lee developed, which includes the music of Wagner and Debussy.

“Building the soundscape was such a privilege… I think it speaks to my personality as well as my team. My editor, Hankyeol Lee, for instance, with the Wagner, I said to her, ‘I really want this to feel nauseating. I wanted to feel disgusting. I really want this, this thing to penetrate deep.’” 

The sonic sensibility has been with Bongela since she was young: “My father’s a musician, my mother was a choral conductor, so music was just something that was always in my home. South Africans, I come from a singing country, a singing people whether we’re sad, whether we’re angry, whether we’re in grief, whether we’re extremely happy, we are singing people. And I think that also is present in the film.”