Milisuthando (Milisuthando Bongela, 2023) + filmmaker in attendance

Thursday, March 26, 2026 7:00pm

Location: Rubenstein Arts Center Film Theater

Milisuthando
(Milisuthando Bongela, 2023,128 min, South Africa, Xhosa and English with English subtitles, DCP)

-- Q&A to follow with director Milisuthando Bongela, in conversation with filmmaker Palesa Shongwe

“In her poetic and galvanizing essay film, Johannesburg-based artist, writer, and first-time filmmaker Milisuthando Bongela has constructed a multilayered and thought-provoking inquiry into history and identity that through five distinct chapters evokes the experience and after-effects of growing up amidst apartheid. Born in 1985, Bongela lived her first, inchoately remembered years with her family in the Transkei, a segregated zone in southeastern South Africa established in the 1970s under a false sense of cultural and geographical independence for Black people. A part of the country’s Xhosa community, the filmmaker delves into personal memories, gradual historical change, the legacies of racism on both Black and white citizens, and her continued search for belonging and identity. Milisuthando is a reminder that none of us exist outside of history.” – Lincoln Center

“Formally daring, thematically ambitious, and—most of all—movingly confessional.” – Dhruv Goyal, In Review Online

“In Bongela’s poignant recollections resides complexity and confusion, layers of trauma connected to accepted doubts and truths about her childhood, country, and home.” – Robert Daniels, rogerebert.com

“The formal experimentation of the film is entrancing and dreamlike, feeling out the borders that our communities build for us and complicating narratives about race and oppression in modernity.” – Alissa Wilkinson, Vox

Milisuthando Bongela-Davis (b.1985, South Africa) is an award-winning writer, filmmaker, cultural worker and artist. Her career began in the fashion industry but the last 16 years have seen her traverse the worlds of music, art, media and film - continually turning towards indigenous knowledge systems.

She was Arts Editor for the Mail & Guardian's Friday section and was host and co-producer of the podcast Umoya: On African Spirituality with Dr. Athambile Masola. Her first film, a personal essay documentary titled Milisuthando had its in competition world premier at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and selected for MoMA’s New Directors / New Films programme 2023 before opening the 2023 Encounters Documentary Film Festival. It was nominated and won awards for its groundbreaking form, subject matter and approach to personal filmmaking.

She is an inaugural fellow of the 2020 Adobe Women at Sundance Fellowship and is currently working on her second film with collaborator Hankyeol Lee — an experimental silent film commissioned by Neo Muyanga for William Kentridge’s Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg. She recently moved to New York from Johannesburg.

Palesa Nomanzi Shongwe is an award-winning South African filmmaker of many “lives”—a television writer, director, teacher and film scholar. She currently works as a freelance story producer in both fiction and documentary forms, while also pursuing an independent research and film career rooted in her interests in film history, personal ethnography, archival research and experimental film forms. She heads up a film development company, UNDERSTORY, which she founded in 2022, and forms one half of the experimental film duo The Detritus of the Day, with fellow filmmaker, scholar and writer Dr. Nobunye Levin. Palesa is an alumnus of the Realness Residency and currently developing her second short, To Dream of Trees, for production in 2025.