South African director Zamo Mkhwanazi has brought “Laundry” (“Uhlanjululo”) to TIFF. She’s no stranger to the fest, where she also premiered shorts, but the story behind her debut feature is personal.
“My grandfather had a laundry and when the apartheid government came in, he lost his business. I knew it had to be my first film. That laundry was always there, in the back of my mind, as a place where my intergenerational wealth was stolen. It had a very big impact on who I am today,” she tells Variety.
Related Stories
“Laundry,” set in apartheid South Africa in 1968, shows a similar family-run establishment operating out of a whites-only area. The problem is, 16-year-old Khuthala (Ntobeko Sishi) wants nothing to do with it. He wants to be a musician, to the horror of his responsible father (Siyabonga Shibe). Soon, he has to fight for the legacy he wanted to leave behind.
Popular on Variety
“I wanted the audience to hope and dream with him, but also to tell the truth. Unless you have a certain level of privilege, your dreams are incredibly precarious. When you deny people opportunities, the whole of humanity loses,” says Mkhwanazi.
“There’s this quote I’m going to butcher [by Stephen Jay Gould] that says he wishes he could be impressed with people like Newton and Einstein. But he knows that any number of Newtons and Einstein died on the cotton fields. This is what injustice does: it robs all of us. Even of something as ubiquitous as music, which is the first thing that ever existed and will never stop existing, because you can make it with anything. Dolly Parton plays her nails!”
Mkhwanazi has been “hugely affected” by music and by musicians, she admits. “Musicians like Prince, who was just his own thing, but absolutely brilliant and compelling. If Prince never existed, my life would be a little bit poorer,” she smiles.
“People like that make you braver. They make you feel you can be different; they save lives. Our story very much mirrors those of Miriam Mageba and Hugh Masekala, who had to escape South Africa. We love them, but who are the others we never got to hear?”
Her film, produced by Philippe Coeytaux, Mkhwanazi and Jim Stark for Akka Films and Kude Media, doesn’t shy away from its characters’ pain. Nor from their joy.
“I’m not afraid of digging into the hard stuff, but that’s not what I find life to be. I don’t find the lives of people who experience oppression to be depressing,” says Mkhwanazi.
“I know from first-hand experience that no one wakes up with the aim to fight the system. We all wake up wanting to fulfill our dreams. It’s also totally authentic to South Africans. Our difficulties haven’t really gone away, but we can’t fight from a place of joylessness. Once the joy is stolen, the war is over.”
Sometimes, instead of repeating what they already know about their situation, her protagonists… make music.
“It’s the constantness of oppression. We’ve all been there, we all know what it is. They don’t need to keep poking the wound. The first thing that heals is each other, their own community, and the fact that connection can create. To create is to heal,” she points out.
Shot by Gabriel Lobos – “He came on board two weeks before the shoot. Rock and roll! That synergy was incredibly important to creating a beautiful picture” – her film has some of the gloss of 1990s historical dramas.
“These are the films that made me. These are the movies I was paying for, with my pocket money, to go and see, sometimes multiple times. I’m very much in love with that era of cinema,” she notes.
“When I first started thinking about the story, obviously I went to the father. He’s responsible for this laundry and for the family. Then I realized it was also about representing what he wanted. Parents have beautiful visions for their children. Even when the world is falling apart, they try to protect them, creating sweetness and joy. I wanted the audience to see this beautiful world, too.”
After digging into the past, Mkhwanazi will head to the future with new project “Newborns.” “It’s already in development. It’s about clones and it’s a very feminist story. I came up with this idea just before COVID,” she teases. But before that, she will reveal more family secrets.
“When all this happened to my grandfather in the 1950s, black South Africans fought. I remember this and it was bloody. We burnt the shops because we weren’t allowed to have our own. By the mid-1980s, black people could have businesses again and my parents opened their first, which they had for the next 23 years, if not longer. I was 11 years old and I had to work there. And I didn’t care!”
“I didn’t care about my parents’ business, didn’t care that the country was burning. My parents were ‘boring’; they were trying to control my life and make me do retail work when I wanted to go to the movies. I completely understood who Khuthala was because I used to be selfish, too,” she confesses.
“I didn’t want to create unrealistic protagonists. The father’s story is very clear: he has a laundry and fights to keep it. But then I thought of someone who HATES the laundry and is supposed to inherit it. That’s the person who’s eventually going to have to try and save it.”
