Xhosa Sci-Fi brings Afrofuturism home
An afternoon chat squeezed between schedules with Mandisa Nduna, creative polymath and star of Stillborn, turns into a cosmic exploration of the makings of an uncompromisingly South African sci-fi film.
“There’s this theory that Earth is a game that higher beings are playing — and we are just the avatars these beings are controlling, like a video game. That’s a working theory — in the real world,” Nduna declaims as we chat about her and her role in Jahmil XT Qubeka’s latest film, Stillborn.
Suspended briefly in the idea that we are mere fleshy avatars in one big game, we laugh away imminent existential crises.
The sci-fi gem opened at the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) Film Festival in Chengdu, China, last month. Stillborn is Qubeka’s response to the festival’s theme, “Where has time gone?”
Stillborn is set 3 000 years into the future, when humans are extinct. Nduna’s character, Nobomi SX1, is an artificial intelligence (AI) labourer in a dystopian society stratified into a caste-like system of labourers, watchers and players. In her work of recovering artefacts from life on Earth, Nobomi SX1 becomes intrigued by her human origins.
But, given her position in her regimented world, she must risk life and limb (or processor and prosthetics) to hack her way into experiencing existence as a human ancestor might have. It’s in the way she blinks.
Nduna’s character is a dystopian hero’s journey like any other. But Stillborn is not just any sci-fi film. It represents a beacon of South African cinema defining sci-fi for itself. Aesthetically, Stillborn is a manifestation of ancestral foresight; costumes draw on traditional Xhosa dress.
The AI characters appear genderless. “He wanted me to look as far from human as possible,” Nduna says of Qubeka’s vision for her transformation into Nobomi SX1.
“I shaved off my dreadlocks and my eyebrows, covered my tattoos, and was made to look gold,” she says with a proud but heavy nod to a briefcase in which her locks are still stored.
Nduna further transformed herself into a distinctly African AI by studying the machines around her. “I’d switch on the printer, for example, and pay attention to its processing time.”
As for the creation of a post-Earth setting, Nduna applauds the imaginations of the film’s set designers: “[They] had a really tough job. They had to create a world where there was no plant life, no bricks, no earthly