Notes from the Underground (F/F)

Notes from the Underground (10P)

Dirs. Adrian van Wyk & Chris Kets | South Africa |2026 | 89 min. 

For Cape Town’s coloured community, the language of hip hop connects them to the ancient energy of the region, while providing a liberation from both the strictures of apartheid South Africa and the neocolonialism that continues to define life in the city for many. Featuring the cream of Cape Town’s hip hop talent, including Ready D, Isaac Mutant, and Mutant’s daughter, Lyrix, this powerful documentary tells the history of Cape hip hop, which it uses as both the medium and the message. As one of the interviewees notes, ‘hip hop provided a space in post-apartheid South Africa for people to find each other after centuries of oppression’, an aspect that Notes From the Underground, with its collective archive of voices, memory, and street-corner culture, celebrates and explores in great depth. The film also looks at the complex cultural contradictions arising from the fact that Afrikaans is the actual lingua franca of the genre.