Laundry

Filmmaker Zamo Mkhwanazi’s quietly powerful debut Laundry crafts an intimate portrait of a Black family navigating the uneasy privileges and hidden costs of exemption within the violently unequal system of apartheid South Africa. The film is set in 1968, the same year that negative international opinion against apartheid fomented during the Summer Olympics but 26 years before the end of the institution.

The film centres on a family-run laundry business operating in a whites-only area — a rare arrangement granted to Enoch (Siyabonga Shibe), the family patriarch. Though technically allowed to work in the neighbourhood, Enoch’s status offers little real protection from intimidation or the shifting whims of an oppressive government. At home, he is determined to secure a future for his children, particularly his son Khuthala (Ntobeko Sishi), whom he hopes will inherit the business one day. But Khuthala’s dreams of a career in music alongside a local singer who is also his father’s mistress, strain against the limits imposed on this by family and the state.

With gorgeous performances and richly rendered period details, Mkhwanazi portrays the daily contradictions of apartheid through the textures of family life: the grind of labour, the silence of resentment, and the flickers of ambition that persist against all odds. Ultimately, the family in Laundry succeeds in excavating a small bit of hope for the most vulnerable among them amidst the absurdities of the regime.

ROBYN CITIZEN