Interview with Milisuthando BONGELA, director of Milisuthando
 

Ｑ：What is the motivation of making this film?

There's two stories that I like to reflect on when telling the story of how the film began. The first one was in 2014 when I went out to breakfast with my friend and I'd had natural hair for a long time. And Instagram was new. It was about 2013, 2012 and people were getting on Instagram and I felt a lot of pressure to change my look from my natural hair to a more Instagram kind of look with straight hair and long nails. I remember telling my friend this and he got so upset with me. He was like, why would you do that? He started mentioning my racial identity. We had a big argument about this because I was like, what has race got to do with any of the way I want to look? And he started mentioning apartheid and oppression and all these things. I went home to research black identity and hair. And I just dived into a rabbit hole where I really learned about the history of colonialism, slavery, and apartheid and how the way that black people look is exactly the reason why our physical attributes have been imbued with these different meanings that makes us seem as if we're inferior compared to other races. And so that was the one side of it.

But the story came back to me again in 2013, 2014, when Nelson Mandela died and we had to go to his funeral with my friends. We were singing different anti-apartheid struggle songs to honor him. There was one song called “My Mother Was a Kitchen Girl, My Father Was a Garden Boy.” I remember going, yes, I grew up in apartheid. Yes, I'm black. Yes, that black people were oppressed. But I came from another kind of place where there was a bit of a nice childhood and I didn't have white people in my childhood. I didn't really understand apartheid or know it. So it became an exploration of trying to understand what my personal history was and why I had not realized that I'm black for such a long time.

It's been a 10-year project of self-exploration, but it's also been a project of understanding my identity through my country: Transkei and South Africa. I feel like many people in our country or in the world did not know about Transkei. It also became a project about how do I love myself? Because I've been raised in a world, on one hand, quite sheltered and ignorant, and on the other, very much not loving myself as a black person. I had to face that.

Ｑ：The film utilizes a lot of archival footage, how do you choose the images?

I didn't want in this film representations of apartheid as we've seen it before. Apartheid was violent. But I was more interested in how does it become violent? If the last step is violence, what is the first step? I was interested in the mentality that creates racism and maintains it. Concerning the archival footage, first of all, I wanted it in color and more domestic. More images of women, more images at homes, and different gestures of power and how they function in public life as well as private life. I also wanted to turn the gaze on white people and whiteness during apartheid. We found all these incredible images online. We were also given some footage by someone who used to be a cameraman during apartheid and he had loads of footage of apartheid that's never been seen before. It became more complex because you imagine that people who are oppressors are going to be always holding guns, but they're not. They're living their lives. I wanted images that represented an alternative perspective on the quiet violence of power. And I wanted to make it more feminine. I feel like the perspectives of the men facing each other with guns and the police and all those things, it's a very masculine understanding of apartheid. But what were the women doing?

Ｑ：In different chapters, many sequences touch upon the idea of ritual, either it is related to indigenous knowledge system or personal ritual. Can you elaborate on the role of rituals in this film journey?

We wouldn't have done any of this without the backing and the support and the knowledge systems that I come from in Southern Africa. Bantu philosophy, I would have never been able to achieve any of this. First of all, just the confidence to make a film. It felt to me like my ancestors had sent me on a mission, because they themselves were artists. I come from people who are writers and musicians and people who are interested in the form of art. Obviously, because black people weren't allowed to make films for a very long time. And I feel like they said, go and do this and we will help you. And in so doing, you will resurrect us and change the ways in which we were suppressed and couldn't make films. So that was just the personal backing that I had. I always knew that I had the support, but also what do they want to say through this medium.

Rituals are normal where I come from. It's part of my life. I wanted to invite the audience to know that this is how we understand existence. This is how we interact with nature, time and space. There are Christianity, indigenous knowledge systems, and African cosmologies that came together in the film because they come together in my life.

Also, I wanted to reflect on how one understand racism from a spiritual perspective. In my own life, this is how I was working it out. What I did was turn the camera on myself and invite the audiences into that process, to unveil complexify of how these things live inside of them as well.

We also did rituals when, for instance, we found some of the archive that was very, very difficult to look at. We cleanse ourselves after that. Because a lot of the times you can watch this archive and it can make you very upset. And you can then take that anger and put it in the cut. And what you do is that you're transferring that energy onto whoever's watching. And so we had to be very careful about how not to do that. And this we did through cleansings and rituals. And I had healers. I had indigenous healers here who were helping me throughout the process. Again, it's a matter of just sharing with the audiences that this is how we live.

Ｑ：Marion, who is your producer of this film, also appeared on screen. Can you elaborate on the choice of including this section? Also why the black screen, with only audio available for the audience to navigate?

It's a reflection on how we put on screen the questions that I have in my mind about the complexities of these relationships. The questions are: can we be friends with these histories that we hold? Can we be friends if the power dynamics between us are, on one hand, we're friends, we get along. But deep down, power in my body is different from power in a white body. How do we reconcile that? I knew we couldn't avoid this question. When we were still at the fundraising stage, we can't avoid our dynamic. She's the white producer and I'm the black director, which is something that always happens in Southern Africa. It's a pairing that I feel needs to be questioned and needs to open up the discussion. We need to be a little bit more honest about who gets to be what.

We knew we couldn't avoid how our relationship affects the way we make film. We know that there's good elements that have allowed us to make film, but we also knew that there's an underside to that. This was the biggest challenge. The whole film was to reflect something that I'm holding and questions that I'm interested in, in a way that provokes people, in a way that engages people where they are with the subject.

Whenever we put my images and her images on screen, we knew something happened, something made me uncomfortable. Something in me is just going to be defensive and I'm not going to listen. So we were trying to figure out how we're going to get people listen with something that is either make them uncomfortable, angry, or make them connect with these people. The decision to take away the picture was to invite the audience into the space that functioned as a confessional where I was busy exposing myself and my own vulnerability around this. And my friend too was exposing herself.

Also, how much do we throw it back to the audience so that they know that this is not a passive exercise? We're not just talking about me and Marianne, Bettina or Jess. This is not a thing relevant to these particular people. This happens everywhere in the world.

The black is also about a comment on cinema and how cinema has not really dealt with race from the perspective of black Africans and black women who are victims of it and who haven't been allowed to really participate in filmmaking for a very long time, at least in Southern Africa. Taking away the light is also commenting on how you cinematically represent these things. Racism is not going to be solved by black people sitting alone. It's also not going to be solved by white people sitting alone. We have to figure out how to have conversations. And right now, I feel like we're still far from resolving these things. So we were just trying to figure out cinematic techniques to deal with a subject that many people can relate to.
 

Ｑ：Have you changed how you perceive your self-identity or relationship with your personal history as well as the collective history after making this film? 

This film has absolutely changed me. It has been the most incredible privilege to make it because I got to truly deep dive and in so doing, create a form of inviting the world to understand what exists in a part of the world that's usually filmed or told by outsiders or foreigners. We hardly have stories where people are really reflecting themselves.

When I finished the last cut, I was sitting by myself in a cinema watching the whole film. And I remember crying so much, thinking this is the first time that I feel like a girl like me has been represented in her fullness and her complexity in a film. This film has absolutely changed my relationship to my identity and myself. I have come to love myself a lot more genuinely, not relying on outside love.

Ｑ：Do you have any words for the Taiwanese audiences?

What I'd love to share with the Taiwanese audience is that actually Taiwan was one of the few countries that recognized Transkei next to Israel in the 70s. I think you should do some research to learn how it happened to be like that. That was very interesting. Also, I would love for audiences there to think about it in relation to the things that they are facing right now. Regarding national identity, regarding self-determination, regarding the boundaries and borders, regarding being recognized and not being recognized. How these questions live next to the questions of what it means to be a human being today? Also to find themselves and find characters that they can relate to in the film.