MILISUTHANDO - film screening & altar installation

ABOUT

Join us for a special screening of the award-winning documentary Milisuthando, as part of our Global Blackness Summer School, themed “For Wholeness: Black Being Well”. The screening will be followed by a ritual gathering and altar installation encounter with the filmmaker, Milisuthando Bongela. Refreshments will be served.

About the film (https://film.milisuthando.com/) 

Set in past and present South Africa, Milisuthando is a poetic coming-of-age personal essay documentary on love and what it means to become human in the context of race, explored through the memories of Milisuthando – who grew up during apartheid but didn't know it was happening until it was over. 

Eight years in the making, Milisuthando is a portrait of me and South Africa growing up together in the aftermath of apartheid. Driven by my narrative voice and a compelling cast of my family, friends, foes and some historical figures, the story braids together the three different worlds of my childhood — The now defunct Republic of Transkei, East London in the 1990s new South Africa and my adult life in Johannesburg. Spanning 30 years in a non-linear manner, the film is a meditation on difficult questions about power, fear, intimacy and love as it relates to race. Through a roving feminine lens, we find ourselves in happened-upon environments that take the viewer into the interiors of the new South Africa and its relationship with its past.

About GBSS

Launched in 2021, the RGC Global Blackness Summer School is an annual, hybrid gathering that takes place in the summer months of the Southern hemisphere. A space for collective exploration and experimentation, this year’s summer school has been made possible by funding from the National Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences and the University of Johannesburg. 

We use the term “global Blackness” to attend to the ways in which Black life exists across the globe, but is not always the ‘same’ experience. This year’s school is “For Wholeness – Black Being Well.” Celebrating praxes of creativity, repair and wellbeing that refuse co-option, our hope is to collectively re-envision liberatory projects on terms that do not presuppose the abnegation of Black joy (as the weighty cost of our ‘freedom’), nor the perennial deferment of Blackness as living with/as possibility. As self-care industries recycle whiteness-as-wellness and ‘global responses’ to a planet in crisis routinely disavow historical imperatives of reparation and repair, we ask: How can we language grammars and practices of being well otherwise? How do we perform the world differently now, refusing the binarization of modernity, progress, the subject, Man? What does it mean to work collectively, and hopefully, as we strive towards whole, if not always well, selves? 

Ever mindful of the question of “from where?”, the RGC Global Blackness Summer School is rooted in the Southern Hemisphere, and in Johannesburg specifically, where as a home for global Blackness studies we gather in-person and online as a local, regional and diasporic community. Presenting scholars, artists and collectives for this year’s programme include: Christina Sharpe, Cathy-Mae Karelse, Danai Mupotsa, Dee Marco (with Lakin Morgan-Baatjies & Maria McCloy), Gabrielle Goliath & Maneo Mohale, Jovan Scott Lewis, Milisuthando Bongela, Nombuso Mathibela, The Nest Space, and Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi.