Let Them Be Seen

Let Them Be Seen, a debut film by South African filmmaker Nolithe Refilwe Mkulisi, is a zany, absurdist non-fiction portrait of Tapoleng, a rural town in the Xhosa-speaking region of the Eastern Cape in South Africa, a region known for its dense concentration of churches, which once also served as havens during Apartheid. Now, forgotten by urban centres in contemporary South Africa, Tapoleng has been slowly transformed by its occupants – the rastafarian men who run a spaza shop speak about their refusal of “White Babylon” in talking-head sequences; a gaggle of young women playfully re-enact their favourite South African 1990s TV show Jam Alley in their homes, along the highways and the open fields; a covert love affair between two young lovers is offered by Mkulisi in fragmentary glimpses; and finally, Mkulisi’s sublime landscape imagery structures the entire work.


As its title suggests, Mkulisi’s debut is concerned with offering divergent modes of self-representation. The film opens with a portrait-orientation iPhone front-camera image of an elderly man walking through open fields, mountains looming behind him, boldly establishing an embodied, subjective viewpoint as its prologue. Throughout, we hear Mkulisi urging her subjects to “do anything” before the camera, seemingly unrestrained by overt authorial direction. Across a series of vignettes featuring different groups and individuals, she constructs a bricolaged, incomplete but expansive vision of community – an exaltation of difference – reinforced by a formally heterogeneous approach that moves between colour and black-and-white DV footage, iPhone recordings, and DSLR images.


Let Them Be Seen consistently subverts one’s expectations of the so-called “rural” film, especially within a contemporary Global cinema context which is populated by didactic, overtly expository national narratives. Here, no effort is spent on trying to map out the religious conservatism of individual subjects, but rather, Mkulisi takes a new approach to exploring the invisible mythologies around the South African terrain. With  landscape imagery reminiscent of Santu Mokofeng’s Chasing Shadows photographic series, Mkulisi resists simply recording what is visible in the terrain. Instead, she imbues the imagery with a kind of negative metaphysics, evoking the weight of all that cannot be seen: the mythologies imposed by Christian Dutch and English colonisers who imagined South Africa’s topography as a “promised land”, set against its contemporary reality as lived farmland and village life. Mkulisi frequently intervenes in her own observational passages by foregrounding the terrain’s present, lived-in quality – an assemblage of young women wearing primary-coloured wigs dance, strut and perform boisterously, heckling a horse-riding passer-by, while crooning to an audience of cows. Playfully undermining the minimalist poetics of the landscape film, Mkulisi brings a sprightly dose of pop-inflected waggishness to the rural.