Art & Culture

South African Director Zamo Mkhwanazi on Apartheid, Everyday Life, and Why ‘Laundry’ Resonated in Amman

BYMeriem Belhiba

August 3, 2026

There is a version of apartheid South Africa that cinema already knows how to recognize. It comes with marches, prison cells, political heroes, and the familiar imagery of resistance. Zamo Mkhwanazi’s Laundry, also known by its Zulu title Uhlanjululo, starts somewhere much less monumental: with a young man who wants to make music and a family trying to keep their business.

Competing in the Non-Arab Feature Competition at the 2026 Amman International Film Festival, the film follows a young jazz musician, played by Ntobeko Sishi, in 1968 Johannesburg as his family struggles to protect their laundry in a whites-only district. Speaking to MILLE in Amman, Mkhwanazi says the point was never to make another film in which apartheid overwhelms every other aspect of Black life. “During all of these moments, people are living their lives,” she says.

That sounds simple, but it cuts against how this history is often filmed. Stories about apartheid frequently center political heroes, freedom fighters, or figures already absorbed into the mythology of resistance. “We often get told about this era through political struggle heroes,” Mkhwanazi says. “Very rarely are these stories just about everyday families, everyday people.”

So the young man at the center of Laundry does not have a heroic ambition. He wants to make music. The director wanted that dream to feel almost mundane, even slightly impractical, because that makes the violence surrounding him more precise. Apartheid does not only interrupt revolutions. It reaches into work, family, ambition and all the small futures people imagine for themselves.

The film itself grew from Mkhwanazi’s family history. Her grandfather owned a laundry, and Black-owned businesses faced increasing restrictions and dispossession under apartheid. But she did not want to reproduce that history literally. When she began speaking to older relatives, she found that they remembered people more vividly than political events.“The event is not the thing that matters,” she says. “It’s the people. It’s small moments with people.”

Those memories became raw material rather than testimony. Mkhwanazi combined relatives, personalities, and fragments of family history into fictional characters, researched the period extensively, then deliberately stopped. “I realized that I needed to stop doing research,” she says. “I’ve got to find the story.”

That instinct is tied to a bigger frustration she has with the way African cinema is often received abroad. African filmmakers, she says, are frequently expected to explain their worlds for Western audiences: the politics, the culture, the history, the social codes. “I don’t think it is actually a request to explain the world to them,” she says. “It is a request to reaffirm their ideas about what they think the world is.”

She points to a question she repeatedly encountered around Laundry: why don’t the characters fight back? The question already imagines what resistance is supposed to look like. Guns. Crowds. Direct confrontation. A visibly political act.

“They are fighting back by living their very ordinary lives in many ways,” she says. For Mkhwanazi, that is where the expectation placed on African cinema becomes limiting. Audiences arrive with images already fixed in their heads, and filmmakers are asked to reproduce them so that the world feels familiar enough to consume. She decided not to.

“I was always very clear that I wanted to make a film for South Africans.” The statement is not about closing the film off to everyone else. It is about refusing the idea that an African story has to translate itself before it is allowed to become cinema.

When films are made about Europe or North America, international audiences are expected to enter those worlds without understanding every detail. They infer, miss references, or catch up later. Sometimes they simply do not know. “Not entirely knowing the world is part of the experience,” Mkhwanazi says.

Her resistance to over-explaining comes partly from her own experience of discovering Black cinema. Growing up in apartheid South Africa, access to artistic films by and about Black people was limited. That began to change in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when she encountered filmmakers such as Spike Lee, Ousmane Sembène, and Djibril Diop Mambéty. She remembers seeing Boyz n the Hood as a child and being struck not only by seeing Black people on screen, but by seeing Black life treated artistically.

“It wasn’t just Black cinema. It was artistic Black cinema,” she says. That distinction still matters to her. African films should not have to earn their seriousness through suffering, nor should their value depend on how efficiently they explain Africa to somebody else.

Even the ten-year process of making Laundry reflected some of those same power dynamics. Mkhwanazi says international financing can quickly become a question of who is trusted to hold authority over a story. At one point, a producer attempted to bring in a white South African man to serve as her South African producer. She later discovered that he had mainly worked as an accountant in the film industry.

“You bring on partners that come from much more powerful countries,” she says, “and at a certain point you realize that you’re not going to make your film. You’re going to make the film that someone else can take control of.” In Amman, she encountered almost the opposite experience.

After two screenings at AIFF, Mkhwanazi described the festival audience as perhaps the strongest the film had met outside South Africa. She is careful not to collapse apartheid South Africa and Palestine into the same history, but she says the distance between the film and the audience felt smaller.

That changed the conversations after the screenings. Palestinian audience members did not need her to first explain what it means for political structures to enter ordinary life. They could move straight to questions about filmmaking, performance, and form.

“They are not trying to extract my experience from me because they have their own experience,” she says. For Mkhwanazi, that made the encounter feel less voyeuristic and more like an exchange. “The story is not being looked at as a curiosity,” she says. “It’s being looked at in how it has been told,” she shares.

That may be the clearest way to understand Laundry. The film does not deny politics. Apartheid is already there, determining where a family can work, what it can own and how far a young man is allowed to imagine his future.

Her protagonist wants to make music. His family wants to keep their laundry. They want ordinary things inside a system designed to make ordinary life impossible.

South African Director Zamo Mkhwanazi on Apartheid, Everyday Life, and Why ‘Laundry’ Resonated in Amman

Suggestions

Articles

Topics

South African Director Zamo Mkhwanazi on Apartheid, Everyday Life, and Why ‘Laundry’ Resonated in Amman

More From Art & Culture

What Our Ancestors Can Teach Us About Surviving the Heat

Inside ‘Habibi Hussein’ and the Story That Almost Went Unseen

The Confused Arab Comes Home With ‘Alger Capitale’

Inside Joanna Arida’s Amman International Film Festival Photo Diary

Suggestions

Articles

Topics

Newsletter

The only newsletter you won't unsubscribe from

Follow Us