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"Black Burns Fast:" Director Sandulela Asanda Sits Down With Us To Talk About Their Debut Film

"The little Black girl who's in high school, who's just scared to even talk to anyone, like, not even her mother! I want her to watch it and know that she has a space."

by Poppy ScarboroughBuzzFeed Contributor

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Black Burns Fast, Sandulela Asanda’s directorial debut, is a teen drama we've been waiting for. It follows Luthando, a queer Black girl navigating teenhood in a predominantly white South African boarding school.

Courtesy of Urucu

I had the chance to sit down with Sandulela to discuss the film’s origins, why nuanced stories about Black girlhood are so important, and how their own experiences shaped the story of Black Burns Fast.

Courtesy of Urucu

Firstly, I just want to say thank you for making a Black lesbian film because a few days ago I was actually going through Letterbox and I was thinking, there are little to no Black lesbian films. I also wanted to thank you for making a Black lesbian film that isn't making the Black lesbians all studs or like masculine, because for some reason, the media loves to just portray Black lesbians as that, which isn't always the truth. Black Burns Fast is such a charged title. What does it mean to you, and how did you come up with it?

For me, it came from the experience of just being a Black girl in high school and it is a science concept of darker things that heat up quickly under the sun, that's kind of what it's like, always being under the lens of dealing with racism, and then sexism, and then also sexuality, all these things become, super focussed on you, and I feel like as a result, Black girls are forced to become self-aware and more mature, where before the time that they should. That's where the title came from for me, and also kind of my ethos towards the characters, which was showing them as young and showing them as kids and allowing them to navigate everything that comes with that.

What was your initial starting point or idea for this film?

Around mid COVID, 2020, a lot of people on my social media were just talking about our experiences being Black girls growing up in these schools that were previously white institutions during apartheid, and what it's still like occupying that space, and if there's been any change, and it turns out not. That made me really sad, the fact that nothing's really changed. A few years after that, I came into myself and became self-aware of my sexuality. I was a queer woman, and I started thinking about high school and all the markers I didn't know were there. I'm thinking about how dealing with all that stuff in high school, the microaggressions, the macroaggressions, didn't leave me a lot of capacity to even think about my sexuality, and I really wanted to talk about that. Then, when I started looking at other queer films around me, they didn't really talk about that, or they were very scary, traumatic, Black girls being uncertified or abused in some way. I wanted to change that narrative because I was like, that can't be the only thing a Black girl can see when she wants to look for that type of thing. I very much just wanted to make the type of film that I needed to see when I was at that age because I was thinking if I had known (at that age) and I'd had that representation, I would have been a much happier person, and I think I would have been a lot more well adjusted because I would have seen something that, showed me in a light that wasn't scary. At least I'd be hopeful about what's on the other side.

Yeah, I think that was a big takeaway for me from watching the film. I really didn't realise how much it wasn't just a me issue, like everyone's going through it. Everyone, no matter where you are, if you're a person of colour and you're gay, good god. I was sitting there thinking maybe there are some layers that I haven't really looked into with myself yet, because growing up, I didn't have the resources to unpack those things.

I think it's also difficult for femme-bodied people because our sexuality isn't taken that seriously, and there aren't necessarily like the major physical markers of that. I think that's also the thing that makes it tough because generally people just accept “oh okay, all girls are heterosexual”, like, no, they're not.

You mentioned that by mid-2020, you were looking back on certain things. Were there any personal experiences that particularly motivated you to pursue this project?

The space of the film, like the Anglican Girls' College, is very similar to the type of high school that I went to. My entire high school career is what pushed me into that, and honestly, compared to the film, what my friends and I went through was way, way, worse, but then I didn't want the film to completely become about that. I don't think I would have gotten through high school without my friends. My group of Black girls, because we all came