Tina Kakadelis
Sandulela Asanda’s OutfestNEXT-playing Black Burns Fast is lovestruck, a dreamy, heart-eyed ode to high school crushes and the power they wield over a teenager. Black Burns Fast marks Asanda’s feature film debut, but the handle she has on this story makes it feel like watching work from an established voice in the industry. Over the course of an hour and a half, Asanda will take you back to your teenage years in all of their passion, strife, and potential.
Two students, both alike in queerness, in a fair, prestigious boarding school, is where we lay our scene. Luthando (Esihle Ndleleni) and Ayanda (Muadi Ilung), the two girls at the center of Black Burns Fast, aren’t torn apart by two feuding families, but rather by teenage insecurities. Luthando would happily identify as a nerd. She’s the poster child of diversity for the mostly-white school and spends much of her time studying with her friend Jodie (Mila Smith). Everything in Luthando’s life is thrown upside down when Ayanda transfers to the school. The all-consuming teenage crush takes over Luthando’s life, and she must learn how to recalibrate everything.
Asanda takes the high school setting and cranks it up in an extremely playful manner, using a mixed-media scrapbook style to introduce the cast of characters. It’s so jovial, so youthful, so tuned in to the creative strangeness that comes from being a teenager with too many emotions to understand. The look of Black Burns Fast is as if Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe had a more homemade, tangible feel, as though bits of Asanda’s film were lifted from a teeny bopper magazine of the early aughts and queered in this beautiful modern way. But Asanda’s playfulness isn’t limited to the more tangible effects. They also mess around digitally.
Sometimes, when Luthando is scrolling hopelessly through Ayanda’s social media, the camera is within the phone screen. The audience is presented with a perspective we’re so rarely on this end of. A fisheye lens is used when Luthando is around the White administration of the boarding school, mimicking the microscope she’s under in this environment. There are so many other creatively charming moments throughout the film, but to continue to list them here would be to rob a first-time viewer of the ingenuity Asanda brings to Black Burns Fast.
Below this glossy, candy-coated exterior is a more emotional undercurrent. Black Burns Fast is not just about the budding relationship between Luthando and Ayanda, but also about the current social climate of South Africa. When apartheid is brought up in class by one of the Black students, the White teacher is quick to say that’s the past; things in South Africa are different now, can’t you see? The treatment of the Black students at the school shows that things may be different, that they aren’t being segregated by law, but apartheid fundamentally altered the course of the country. In the same way that slavery has not been fully left behind in the United States, apartheid cannot be when a large portion of society refuses to acknowledge the lasting impact this violence has imparted.
Black Burns Fast is a coming-of-age movie, but one that reinvigorates the genre. In an interview with Afro Critik, Asanda mentions a review that critiqued their film for not “revolutionising” the coming-of-age genre. That didn’t faze Asanda because it was never their intention to do so, but for Black Burns Fast to be done boldly in her vision. That’s exactly what she’s done here. Even if the sun has long set on your high school days, Black Burns Fast will get you smiling at the big, too-much-teeth smile of a person falling in love with themselves, the world around them, and someone else.
