SOUTH AFRICAN FILM24 JUL 2026‘Black Burns Fast’ is a whimsical love letter to Black girlhoodIn a media landscape often criticised for its misrepresentation of Black women and girls, Sandulela Asanda’s debut feature, ‘Black Burns Fast’, emerges as a refreshing…Riley Hlatshwayo8 min read

Every new show or film with an ensemble cast seems to centre on a white or racially-ambiguous main female character who has at least one non-white actress as a friend, antagonist or recurring character who doesn’t recur that much. In a world that churns out these kinds of (mis)representations in the coming-of-age genre, stories like Sandulela Asanda’sBlack Burns Fastbecome all the more important. The study of identity and becoming in the social structures of high school is a teen media staple but the tropes have often sidelined Black girls, rarely affording them the grace to simply exist and be young.

They are either flattened, tokenised or typecast into trauma-laden narratives that make them appear far more mature than their counterparts. In contrast, Asanda’s feature debut is a whimsy exploration of Black girlhood and first love. Set in a prestigious Christian boarding school, the film follows 17-year-old Luthando, played by Esihle Ndleleni, a smart and incredibly disciplined scholarship pupil whose curated life takes an interesting turn when a new student, Ayanda, played by Muadi Ilung, arrives.

What unfolds is a cute and quirky, visually intriguing coming-of-age romance that bypasses the tropes and takes one girl who’s always believed herself to be one thing and places her in a group of girls who show her the possibilities of girlhood. Asanda delivers a whimsical love letter to queer Black girlhood that insists on treating young womanhood as the joyful act of self-discovery it is, rather than a moral obstacle. Speaking to Asanda about her film, the queer writer-director with a background in economics and law says they have always been curious about the world and the way things works, especially where women and queer people are concerned.

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“When I started writing this film, I had been a baby gay on the streets of Cape Town for a while but I had decided to tell my parents. This was around the first year of Covid,” they say. During online conversations with a group of people from previously all-white schools about their experiences, the Safta Youth Achiever recipient was taken back to their time in high school, wondering if their queerness was known to them and the people in their lives at that time, coming to the conclusion that it couldn’t have been.

“There was no way for me to know because there was just no room for it in that space. No one spoke about it.”

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