This is a dreamlike, autobiographic memoir that poetically deconstructs her discovery of the impacts of apartheid’s segregation and racism after it had ended. We break down MILISUTHANDO by Milisuthando Bongela in this episode.
Sundance 2023 Section: World Cinema Documentary Competition
Distribution: Not Available, but updates from Multitude Films
From Sundance’s website: This penetrating coming-of-age personal essay on love and what it means to become human in the context of race explores the memories and experiences of Milisuthando Bongela, who grew up within apartheid without knowing it was happening until it was over.
Bongela was born to a loving middle-class Xhosa community in the Transkei — an unrecognized state that was formulated out of the separate development dream of the apartheid regime in South Africa. The Transkei was designed to raise some denizens on a diet of suggestions that they did not experience the ills of apartheid, and though it was dissolved after the fall of apartheid, it left behind bewildered memories in those who built their lives inside the regime’s sordid social experiment.
Milisuthando elucidates that apartheid was something that was done to all of us. Bongela invites the audience in as she plumbs the anatomy of race as bequeathed to us by our ancestors and explores what roles our ancestors play in how we create our personhood.
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.501] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. And I'm Wonder Bright. And welcome to Story All the Way Down. We're looking at the Sundance Documentaries from 2023. And today we have another film that was in the World Documentary Competition called Milisu Tondo, which was a piece self-titled by the director of Milisu Tondo, Pangela. And it's described as a biographical personal coming of age story where Mila Sutondo is really trying to reckon what it meant to be living under apartheid when she didn't quite realize it. I'm going to read this section from the synopsis just to set a bit more broader context. So she grew up within apartheid without knowing it was happening until it was over. She was born to a loving middle-class Xhosa community in the Transkei, which was an unrecognized state that was formulated out of the separate development dream of the apartheid regime in South Africa. The Transkei was designed to raise some denizens on a diet of suggestions that they did not experience the ills of apartheid. And though it was dissolved after the fall of apartheid, it left behind some bewildered memories and those who built their lives inside the regime's assorted social experiment. So this is really an exploration of trying to explore these different dimensions of race and what it meant to be born under this regime. And it takes you on this route through five different chapters. And it's got a lot of more experimental elements, but also personal elements. There's these ritual elements that are kind of embedded into this piece. And so, yeah, I'd love to hear a little bit of your first take of this piece.
[00:01:51.594] Wonder Bright: Yeah, I mean, first of all, I really loved it. It wasn't an easy watch, although my attention was held and captivated all the way through. And like some other films that we've spoken about already so far, The Tube of Thieves comes to mind, a film we haven't yet spoken about, Twice Colonized. There is an element to the way the story is told that actually is hard to get a handle on in some ways. In the case of Melissa Tondo, the film is hard to get a handle on because some of the narrative, the way that she has shaped the narrative is very dreamlike. So, you know, it's like trying to understand your own dreams. This is why we write them down because they don't always make sense immediately upon waking up. And similar to a solid dream, I have found myself thinking about this film over and over again. There's some things that come up inside of the film that I'm sure we'll begin to talk about as we dive into it. But for now, I just want to say that it operates almost as a dream narrative. And so the kinds of things that stay with you, stay with you in the manner of dreams. And that is both its strength and the difficulty of watching it. Just like a dream is hard to remember, this dream is hard to follow in a certain way. It has its own logic.
[00:03:19.261] Kent Bye: And there's a lot of poetic commentary that Melissa Tondo is also adding in there. And so she's got these deep reflections and listening to it. I felt like it was like listening to a poem in some ways. And so it requires that extra level of cognitive load to really interpret the things that she's saying on top of these other explorations of this journey of identity and race and these explorations through the five chapters from birth, bewitchment, protections, purging, and a goat calls me back home. So, she's starting with the Xhosa community, connecting to her family and her relatives, and also just, as she's stepping outside of that, showing a little bit of the archival footage and the history. And I'd say it's more than anything, this first-person narrative through this stuff. There's this other area of the trans guy that is separated out that is being cast as this place where all these people that are living there can be free as they want or some degree of like they have even more freedom to be separated from the oppressions that they have with these other engagements. But I think there's a way in which that they're also being disconnected from other aspects. It's described in the description as a regime-sorted social experiment. So you have this sense where while people were inside of it, they don't necessarily recognize it, but as they come out of it, trying to reckon what it meant to be living within the context of that. And so there's a lot of that aspect that she's exploring throughout the course of this piece. And there's a ritual component that I'd say is just through the visuals and you feel like you're honoring different elements of their practices of how they're in relationship to the world around them that I think is embedded through the course of this piece. as well as this kind of like indigenous way of being and knowing where she's talking about history is not written in the history books, it's living with inside of your aunt. And while you interact with your aunt, that history is continuing to be alive. And so it's this sense of this living relational history that she's tapping into. So I guess the experience of watching this is to be led through this journey of personal exploration of trying to get at the answers of what it meant to be living within the context of this apartheid, but also this larger racial dynamics that we're playing out and the ways that she's addressing that through what she's showing us, but also some of the conversations she has throughout this piece as well.
[00:05:46.221] Wonder Bright: Yeah, as an American, the way that she describes the trans guy is relatable to me through the perspective of how we place Native Americans onto reservations. We gave them the worst pieces of land in the country and it was sort of promoted as they're going to have their own autonomous lives here. And yet, you know, circumstances have not entirely played out in terms of that bold declarative statement of what was actually occurring. So one of the main themes that this film is bringing to bear is the theme that we've been seeing in a lot of the films that we've been talking about so far, which is this idea of exile or the astrological idea of the 12th house. What is it to go so far away that you can't come back to something? Even if you can get back to the geographical location, what if you can't actually get back? What was it for the residents of the Transkei to be exiled or annexed from South Africa and then to be put back into it and no longer be able to return to the Transkei as it had once been? So one of the really evocative features of the way that Melisa Tondo talks about her experiences as a child growing up in the trans guy and then being brought back into South African culture at large with all of the Dutch white settlers, is this feeling of having belonged when she was in the trans guy. Like her memories of childhood are actually happier than her memories once she's back experiencing desegregation. And so there's this quality of dissonance in terms of marrying her identity as a child before she left the trans guy to the pieces of the puzzle that she then had access to once she was desegregated and growing up in apartheid in South Africa as a whole with white people. And that exploration of leaving and trying to return in some ways I think is reconciled by her conversations about the ancestors and like just being able to have that through line to what went before and what comes after is extremely compelling. I think maybe particularly as a white person, I'm like a first generation American on my father's side, which is English and third generation on my mother's side, which is Finnish. So it's especially from the English side of my culture. This is like a colonized country for centuries going back. So, there's a way in which white people don't have access. We can talk about Daughters of the Revolution all we want and the United States, but when it comes to thinking about ancestors in terms of some origin state that comes from multi-generations where our name recognizes our mother, our grandmother, our great-grandmother, our great-great-grandmother, our great-great-great, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We've just completely lost the thread. And this, I think, is one of the things that Indigenous cultures have to illuminate the experience of being human, which is we come from somewhere and we are leaving something behind. The future generations are depending on us. And the way that she speaks from inside that place is so beautiful and rich and immediate. And it is in marked contrast to her experience of in her generation trying to integrate what it means to be confronted with her identity when it isn't being honored as a part of that whole, but is being subjected to the gaze of a colonizing nation or people that can't understand her within that context. So she's both been removed from the context and she's bringing it with her. So what is next? What is the new creation? And I don't know that she's said that explicitly, but that was some of the stuff that it pulled up for me through her exploration. And just made me so curious to understand what she's saying, to understand her questions, you know, to like really try to listen for the questions that she's asking and to sit with them as questions. You know, like I said, this film It has a very dreamlike quality to it. And so in that sense, it isn't very definitive, right? There are multiple places to enter and exit. So I think it suits a real questioning, inquisitive, attentive state.
[00:11:02.908] Kent Bye: Yeah, I really resonate with your description of that dreamlike quality because there is this experiential element of being immersed into these different scenes and the juxtaposition of all these images. Because it was like this personal essay in drawing from these archival photos and footage, but also telling the story, but the story was really centered in her explorations and her relationships. And she's directly in conversation with her ancestors, with her grandparents throughout the piece. And the other thing that I guess, as I think about this as a film, from that indigenous perspective of more of a relational context, You kind of speak of it as different modes of entering and exiting at different places. And it doesn't have that traditional hero's journey arc that you might see in other films that were within the competition at Sundance.
[00:11:54.837] Wonder Bright: I mean, at least traditional in the Western sense that we're familiar with. I don't know how it occurs for her.
[00:12:02.986] Kent Bye: Yeah, I guess when I think about the Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, I describe it as like a young archetypal journey where it's a lot about you going out and making choices and taking actions under pressure and you're overcoming obstacles. And there is a journey aspect to this film, but I do feel like it's a little bit more of what I might describe as a yin archetypal journey, which the yin is about trying to see how you're in relationship to the world around you in a way that it's less about the solar aspect of individuating your consciousness, but in some ways, that more lunar component of finding the relational connections to how you're in relationship to the world around you. And I feel like as a film, it's in that more yin archetypal mode of storytelling and mode of being that does give that more dreamlike quality that you kind of slip in and out. So I don't know if that resonates with you at all, but that's at least how I start to think about my experience of this film.
[00:13:01.306] Wonder Bright: I don't really think about it like this. We've had debates around this way of thinking about it before. And I'm realizing, perhaps because we're talking about it in relation to this film, that I think one of my main problems with it is that the Joseph Campbell description of a journey isn't just Jung. It is based on a kind of Shakespearean version of reality, which depends on a monotheistic conversation with one God and one version of the story. So it focuses on an individual who, through their journey, overcomes their fates with the use of free will and autonomy and their capacity to go after what they desire. And if it's a Shakespearean tragedy, they cause their own destruction through the course of pursuing their free will. But one way or another, inherent within the context of a Shakespearean drama is this idea that it's coming from this monotheistic conversation about fate and free will. And free will is first of all assumed. And secondly, it's also assumed that one person has the right to move forward through their experiences. And I don't think we need to think about it as yang, which is so often associated with masculine, and yin, which is associated with feminine, and keep it within that kind of binary system in order to have a conversation about a different kind of narrative. Because it can also be about the difference between a monotheistic culture where there's one god and a polytheistic culture where there's many gods. And I'm not familiar with the Xhosa divinity system that Melisitando is drawing from, presumably. But we have polytheistic religions in our own Western history. Astrology is actually created by people who had a polytheistic version of divinity. The Greeks believed in gods, not a god. And so they didn't have the same kind of conversation about it that we've had. Polytheistic religions have other deeper questions about fate and free will and what a hero's journey is. within a polytheistic religion, there's a different kind of understanding about the fates. And you don't have just one God that you can plead with in order to intervene with your fates. And you don't have just one version of the story. There's multiple versions of the story. There's a Greek chorus. It's always going to be playing out within this version of an ensemble that is really hard for the Western mind to understand because we're so steeped in this monotheistic version of reality that is in conversation with one God and one version of the story. And to make it into either Yin or Yang kind of negates that thrust of an experience of multiplicity in the way that a polytheistic religion might apprehend things. And, obviously, we have no way of knowing what kind of model Mila Sutandu is basing her perspective on, or if she would even describe it in those ways. And I would say that, for me, I'm more comfortable with thinking about it from that perspective, that there's like a multiple narrative rather than an either-or narrative. And I understand that when you're talking about the Yen archetypal journey, you are talking about narrative. It's just that I think within a multiple version of a journey, it doesn't negate the singular perspective. It's just a part of a whole.
[00:16:47.350] Kent Bye: Yeah. I understand what you're saying in terms of the plurality of the different aspects of character, because I don't necessarily personally connect yang and yin with the monotheistic versus polytheistic. It's just more of the different types of traditional narrative structures that we're used to having within the West tend to follow a certain arc. And I'm just trying to point out a name that the type of narrative structure that Milos Zotando is following here is a little bit unorthodox in the way that doesn't necessarily fit into the type of films that have that kind of hero's journey that we would name in the same way. There's been debates around the hero's journey versus heroine's journey and trying to differentiate alternative narrative structures. The only point that I'm trying to make, I guess, is that once you start to name and understand these alternative structures, then you start to make sense of how to understand it or how to experience, almost like a form of genre where you walk into it understanding that it's going to be a different mode of how a story is going to be communicated. And it requires you to receive it in a different way. And I think that as we look at the different films that are being picked up at this point, this film's not on that list that's going to be widely distributed. And it's hard for me to not make this connection that because it's this unorthodox structure, that it's perhaps invisible or hidden in a 12 house exiled way, that we don't have the language of naming or understanding it. And without that language of identifying it, it falls to the cracks. because it doesn't fit the mold of what we expect in other types of films. So that's part of the reason why I love going to Sundance is because you get to have access to these different types of stories that you may not otherwise have access to because the Sundance staff have built up a reputation that their curation is of a certain quality that isn't always following the normal economic structures. They're trying to break through. So I feel like through their curation and featuring of a film like this, it's being able to center these types of indigenous stories and non-traditional narrative structures in a way that we can still enjoy, but that it may be difficult for critics to understand or to talk about or to write about or for the distributors to buy and acquire and figure out how to market because it gets translated into, at that point, an economic problem of how to describe what it is and communicate it. So I think part of what we're trying to do throughout the course of this podcast series is find the language that starts to describe these patterns and our own experiences of it as well, that through the modes of these other disciplines that we're bringing the conversation can start to more fully contextualize it.
[00:19:27.695] Wonder Bright: Yeah, I understood your meaning in terms of this film was coming at it from something that is distinctly not the Joseph Campbell hero's journey is coming at it from a completely different mode. And I recognize that you were honoring the story as it was being told to us when you said that. I hope you'll forgive my pedantic discursion into this explication of the difference between the hero's journey through Shakespeare versus the hero's journey to the ancient Greeks. Because I think this is another way of thinking about story that doesn't conform to the Western model as it's been handed down to us at this point. So, you know, when I encounter a film that has a narrative that breaks up my expectations, I do experience it as harder, right? Like I can put that mental model on and I'll never know for sure how fully I'm inhabiting it because I didn't grow up with it. It's not the natural. I can never assume that I'm understanding everything the filmmaker is trying to share. In the same way that I think it's pretty straightforward, we sort of talked about this when we talked about Still, a Michael J. Fox movie, because we were talking about how it really followed the classic Shakespearean model of story. And it's extremely easy to digest. You get the point. You understand what's being told to you. You understand how it's being told to you. It's extremely easy to digest, and it's lots of fun. And it's number one on the movie critics choice of documentary films that came out of Sundance. And I think that's why. Because nobody had to fight to understand it, right? But I'm not going to remember the Michael J. Fox movie. I'm going to remember Milicitando. It's going to stay with me.
[00:21:18.493] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. And so, so what are you bearing witness to in Mila Svitando?
[00:21:27.355] Wonder Bright: Well, there are images from this film that will stay with me. I don't want to spoil what they are, because I think the discovery lies in the images. So I'll just say that she starts the film with mobile phone footage of something that occurred that stayed with her through the making of the film. And because of watching this film, it's also going to stay with me in ways that really provide more of a portal. To me, it operates more as a question than any kind of answer. And it's so effective in that fashion. And then the other thing that's going to stay with me is this question that she asks her white friend Bettina in a section called Purging. She asks her, when did you discover that you were white? And Melissa Tondo is asking this question, I think, because it was a discovery for her that she was, quote, Black when schools became desegregated, and it changed her perception of reality. And so, of course, she has that same curiosity about anyone, right? Like, when did you discover your relationship to whiteness is another way of thinking about it. But to think about it the way that she's framed it. When did you discover that you were white? Places it into a space where one has to actually confront it. And there's so many conversations that are going on around about whiteness in the world these days. Necessary, vital conversations. We need more of them. And I wish that this was a way that people had of framing it to enter into that conversation because it contains the germ of understanding that whiteness can only ever be relational. And that in its relationality, it's set up as a system of a hierarchy, as a system of superiority and inferiority, so that one can only ever be ranked on a ladder. You're only above if there are other people below you. So it's a construct that nobody can ever win from. And so that interrogation of understanding one's relationship to whiteness as a construct is really vital, I think. And to think of it in the way that she's asking it is a way for white people to enter into this conversation about their own relationship to whiteness that I've never heard put in that way before. And I just think it's so powerful and disarming. It's just really disarming. That's something I'm going to take with me. I'm going to carry that for a long time.
[00:24:10.501] Kent Bye: Yeah, that's a good provocation asking yourself, when did you discover that you were white? It reminds me of the work of Bryan Stevenson and the documentary that he did on true justice, where I think that as a documentary goes through and shows the way in which these laws that were passed that were originally codifying and defining what whiteness means in contrast to defining people of color in the way that they were going to be restricting their freedoms And to see how the governments and legal institutions have defined that over the years, leaves these constructs that have created these inequities over multiple generations. So, yeah, that documentary, True Justice for Me, by Bryan Stevenson, really laid it out in a way that made me think about it in a new and different way. And, you know, as I watch this film and listen to the journey that Milos Lutondo takes us on, I feel like she's both exploring and discovering these things from her own journey. And I feel like it's a powerful reflection to go on that journey with her. And the thing that I'm bearing witness to is, you know, when I think about these different films, I very much enjoy watching the Meet the Artist videos that each of them make. And I feel like the filmmaker has an opportunity to make an artist statement or to really pitch what the film is about. And when you watch the Meet the Artist statement from Elsa Tondo, she's doing these different rituals, and she's speaking in this poetic way, and you kind of get a sense of the vibe that she continues throughout the course of this film, that has that dream-like, altered state of consciousness type of mode of being that is really asking us to relate to it in a new and different way. And like you said at the beginning, that you have to work for it, it's challenging, and I think it's It's a bit of like piecing together a puzzle piece as she's laying down both the footage and the history and her own personal accounts. And yeah, it's also a film that stuck with me because there's the indigenous consciousness that is brought into that way that stories are told and being really open to alternative modes of storytelling. And I just really appreciate that I had a chance to be able to see it. And I hope that others will be as well. But as we discussed, you know, there This may be the type of film that is more difficult to understand, to describe, to market, to promote. It's kind of like in a dreamlike package that is not like a lot of other films that I have reference to that I can point to say, oh, it's like this or it's like that. It's kind of like a unique way of telling the story.
[00:26:56.034] Wonder Bright: Yeah. And, you know, the fundamental devastating irony of the fact that a film like this, which is about exile and about exploring notions of identity when your identity is being erased, there's just a final devastating irony in the idea that people won't actually be able to get access to these stories. This is one of those moments when I would really, really love to be wrong about this film. If we find it somewhere, we will put it in the show notes. Yeah, I hope everybody gets a chance to see this and experience it.
[00:27:33.802] Kent Bye: Yeah, so that was Mil Sotando by Mil Sotando Bangela. It's a film that was in the World Documentary Competition at Sundance 2023. And yeah, the distribution's to be determined. And yeah, thanks for joining us on Story All the Way Down. If you'd like more information, you can go to storyallthewaydown.com to get more information about this episode and others and to also find ways to support the podcast. So thanks again for joining us.
