Interview: Zamo Mkhwanazi – Laundry (2025)

Rooted in an observational, character-driven approach, Zamo Mkhwanazi‘s work explores intimate moments drawn from lived experience, focusing on how ordinary routines reveal larger social and personal truths. In Laundry (a TIFF world premiere that was a competition title at the 2025 Marrakech Film Festival), Mkhwanazi interrogates the uneasy privileges and hidden costs of exemption under apartheid South Africa’s violently unequal regime in 1968. With several players converging, the glue of the family might be the family patriarch in Enoch (Siyabonga Shibe), but what gets passed down to his son Khuthala (Ntobeko Sishi) is more than the daily operations of a family business. Exploring themes of labour, care, vulnerability, and human connection, this is a film about the small gestures, silences and acts of rebellion. I’ve had the chance to speak to the South African born, Swiss filmmaker on two separate occasions (Sundance 2020, Marrakech Atlas Labs 2024), and here we got to chat about the writing process, casting and production design.