Black Burns Fast: Black joy, at full volume

There are only so many ways to make a teenager miserable on screen. Movies have spent decades perfecting the formula. Give the adolescent an imposing crush, disapproving parents, impossible beauty standards, social humiliation and a soundtrack soaked in melancholy. If the teenager also happens to be queer, add another layer of anguish.

Better still, make sure someone gets beaten up, dies, leaves, rejects them, or all four. By the closing credits, audiences leave emotionally wrung out and critics congratulate themselves on having witnessed something “important”. In any case, feeling depressed and helpless to do anything about the suffering teen is surely the point.

South African filmmaker Sandulela Asanda has had enough of that. Her debut feature, Black Burns Fast, which arrived in South African cinemas this weekend after a triumphant festival run that included the Berlinale (Berlin International Film Festival) and the closing night of BFI Flare, London’s LGBTQIA+ Film Festival, is political by refusing to be a political film. Instead of trauma, it offers tenderness. Instead of punishment, possibility. Instead of reducing black queer identity to suffering, its heroine is awkward, funny, hopeful and interestingly uncertain. Best of all, we don’t feel sorry for her, nor traumatised by her story.

So many told me they’d been scared to watch queer films because they’re usually so sad. Now they have a happy one to start with.

Set within the clipped hedges and rigid routines of a prestigious South African girls’ boarding school, Black Burns Fast follows Luthando, a scholarship pupil whose meticulously organised world begins to wobble with the arrival of the enigmatic Ayanda. It sounds like familiar coming-of-age territory but Asanda has done something more layered.

Luthando isn’t simply navigating first love. She’s simultaneously carrying the invisible weight of race, class, academic expectation and family obligation — burdens that many South African teenagers understand instinctively, even if they don’t always have the vocabulary to describe them.

Asanda seems to. “The first two drafts were quite scathing about my high school experience,” she says. “They dwelt on the structural racism and homophobia I’d encountered growing up.” But somewhere between those early drafts and the finished film, she realised she wasn’t interested in preserving bitterness. She wanted to make the film she’d never experienced herself.

“I had to get those feelings out,” she says. “Then I came back to the core of the story — the film I wanted to make for my younger self."

That decision fundamentally changes the emotional consistency of Black Burns Fast. Happiness and fun are strangely neglected emotions in contemporary art cinema. We seem to prefer to celebrate films that devastate us. We praise television that traumatises or horrifies us. Somewhere along the way, delight acquired the unfortunate reputation of being artistically lightweight. But, as this film proves, joy can be as subversive as outrage.

For Asanda, choosing happiness wasn’t about pretending prejudice doesn’t exist; it was about not letting prejudice monopolise the narrative. “It became both a personal choice and a political choice,” she says. “Positive representation matters when you’re trying to figure out who you are and your place in the world.”

The boarding school itself becomes a metaphor for South Africa: polished on the surface, complicated underneath. Asanda attended The Diocesan School for Girls in Makhanda (then Grahamstown), where she was one of only around 20 black girls in a grade of 75 pupils. The incidents she recalls aren’t spectacular enough to make headlines. They’re small and subtle slights — a racist slur dismissed as youthful banter. Teachers discouraging pupils from speaking their home languages. Small exclusions accumulating until they begin to penetrate the skin.

“The school became a microcosm of South African society,” she says. “If you know what to look for, you can see those conversations happening beneath the surface.” But rather than delivering lectures, the film trusts audiences to recognise familiar dynamics for themselves.

The film’s title carries more weight than it first appears to. Borrowing from the scientific principle that darker materials absorb heat more quickly, Black Burns Fast becomes a metaphor for how black girls are so often required to grow up sooner than everyone else. “They’re put in the hot seat earlier,” Asanda says. “There’s family pressure, societal pressure, self-pressure, and the way black girls are often adultified.” It’s an elegant title because it functions both literally and emotionally.

Visually, Asanda was determined that the film would not resemble the solemn social realism often associated with landmark South African cinema. Instead, she gleefully raids pop culture.

Gaming aesthetics, dream sequences, filmmaker Sofia Coppola’s dreamy femininity all impact the film. Michel Gondry, French filmmaker best known for directing the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, influenced Asanda’s visual inventiveness. American screenwriter and director Dee Rees’ extraordinary sensitivity to photographing black skin had an impact on the aesthetics of Black Burns Fast. Even the teenage exuberance of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, a 2010 romantic action comedy film directed by Edgar Wright, finds its way into the mix.

The result is something like a candy-coloured fever dream, and international audiences have embraced her novel and unique approach to filmmaking.

After more than 25 festival screenings across Europe, Asia, Africa and North America, viewers were fascinated by the depiction of this touching love story that reflects and celebrates contemporary South Africa, warts and all.

“People often assume apartheid ended and everything was magically fixed,” says Asanda. “It’s strange. They know apartheid happened, they know it’s over and they think everything is 100% afterwards.” But anyone living here knows history is less cooperative than that.

The other audience response surprised her even more. Young queer viewers kept thanking her for making a film that wasn’t terrifying. “So many told me they’d been scared to watch queer films because they’re usually so sad,” she says. “Now they have a happy one to start with.” It’s hard to imagine higher praise.

The cast, led by Esihle Ndleleni as Luthando and Muadi Ilung as Ayanda, appears carefully chosen for emotional authenticity. Asanda wanted Luthando to have a physical awkwardness — someone visibly uncomfortable in her own skin — while ensuring Ayanda resisted becoming a convenient villain. “She has pain too,” Asanda says. “She’s a child who thinks disappointing everyone is the only way to be free.”

Her complex character development belies the young filmmaker’s age. But Asanda’s route into filmmaking wasn’t inevitable. She first completed a scholarship-funded degree in economics and law at UCT before eventually following her instincts to AFDA, the South African School of Motion Picture Medium and Live Performance, where she discovered directing after concluding nobody else quite understood the stories she wanted to tell. “So I thought, like many South Africans, I’ll just do it myself.” Rather than waiting for permission or a road map, she picked up the camera and pressed record.

Black Burns Fast is her first feature, but it doesn’t feel tentative. It arrives with the assurance of a filmmaker who understands that representation is about expanding the emotional possibilities available to audiences, not just ticking boxes.

You can be black, exuberant and gay without your story ending in tragedy. You can stumble through adolescence without being forced on film to suffer for it.

Maybe that’s why this movie feels larger than its genre. It tells a difficult story while allowing its young characters — especially the young black gay women — the luxury of surviving adolescence with their humour intact. The freshness of that says more about the films we’ve been watching than the one Asanda has just made.