Two young women, one nerdy and bookish, the other charismatic and carefree, find each other – secretly. In a conservative elite boarding school in South Africa. A debut feature about a warm-hearted queer love story that has a few hurdles to overcome. But then the game of hide-and-seek is over.
Director Sandulela Asanda’s buoyant coming-of-age comedy Black Burns Fast is set in a prestigious Christian girls-only boarding school in South Africa, where nerdy scholarship student Luthando appears to have her life perfectly calibrated—until charismatic troublemaker Ayanda arrives and sweeps her off her feet.Queerness is treated as if it does not exist at the highly conservative school, and Luthando struggles to conceal her feelings. When she is suddenly welcomed into the orbit of the cool girls—who once ignored her but now usher her into a giddy world of after-school mischief and new freedom—her carefully ordered life begins to tilt. Only her closest friend Jodie understands what is happening, caught between the fear of losing Luthando to first love and the quiet pride of watching her step into herself. Long positioned as the faculty’s prized showcase student and the dutiful only child of a single mother with high expectations, Luthando gradually finds the courage to assert her own desires.
A Slightly Different High School Comedy
Asanda knowingly nods to the Hollywood high-school canon—echoes of Booksmart, Mean Girls, and Bottoms ripple throughout—while grounding the story in a distinctly South African context. Refreshingly, body-shaming is absent from the cool girls’ repertoire - the sharpest insult Luthando endures is being dismissed as “plain oats,” coded as bland and uniform. Interestingly the trope of the cool mean girl clique gives way to a welcoming circle of black girlhood that supports Luthandos journey instead of judging her.The narrative follows a recognisable coming-of-age arc and underlines the struggles of a post-Apartheid society within the microcosmos of an elite institution that is still tightly holding on to past beliefs. Luthando begins as an overachiever eager to satisfy a predominantly white faculty that treats her as its token success story. When a classmate suggests she is merely fulfilling a quota, she fires back, exposing the racial hierarchies that continue to structure the institution. Unsurprisingly, the school closes ranks. Later, when a video of her kissing Ayanda circulates online, it is not the instigator who is punished but the girls themselves who are suspended. The story finds a way to re-focus on a happy ending for Luthando, while her sudden outfall with the faculty and subsequently her mother are somehow sorted out a little too quickly.
Success Story Instead of Misery
Black Burns Fast centres Black and queer girlhood within elite spaces still shaped by the lingering architectures of Apartheid. In the spirit of the Afrobubblegum movement—committed to joyful, vibrant stories about thriving African protagonists—the film counters the hardship-driven narratives that often dominate Western festival screens. Through playful video-game inserts and bursts of slapstick, Asanda visualises her heroine’s inner life with exuberance, even as she traces the awkward ruptures of adolescence. The result is a portrait of a young woman learning to sharpen her voice, claim space, and burn brightly on her own terms.Following her short film Mirror Mirror, which premiered in the Berlinale’s Generation 14plus section in 2023, Asanda returns to youth cinema with a confident, effervescent feature that depicts queerness as joyful act of self deliberation. A much needed voice - and certainly the opposite of plain oats.
February 2026
