🤩 Black Burns Fast, dir. Sandulela Asanda, 2025, South Africa, 97 min., in English and isiXhosa
Friday, June 19, 2026, 5:30 PM, New Parkway 🌉 Bay Area premiere
Friday, June 26, 2026, 3:00 PM, Roxie Theater
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| Black Burns Fast |
Frameline blurb: A typical star student who’s navigating high expectations at her elite all-girls boarding school, Luthando is a proud nerd who isn’t afraid to be rivals with a trio of “cool” girls. But when charismatic newcomer Aydana arrives, Luthando’s world is turned upside down. A quickly formed, all-consuming crush soon jeopardizes Luthando’s scholarship and threatens her relationship with her long-time best friend, Jodie.
A delightfully inventive coming-of-age story, director Sandulela Asanda’s debut feature brings its protagonist’s comic book-loving inner world to life in vivid detail, all while portraying the sweetest and most awkward aspects of girlhood and first love. As tender as Heartstopper and as eccentric as Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Black Burns Fast is a must-see lesbian young adult yarn.
My take: I’ll be honest: my attention wandered a bit in the first half hour or so, to the point that I was wondering if I was going to sit through the whole thing. But I did stick to it, and the perseverence paid off. The story really found its footing, giving the characters much greater depth. There are plenty of laughs, but also plenty of feels and more than a few surprises from characters stepping outside the boxes you thought they were in.
I found only one film I‘ve reviewed that was in isiXhosa, a feature film called The Wound (Inxeba) (Frameline41) about a boy’s coming-of-age ritual. The documentary Who I Am Not (Frameline47) looks at the lives of some intersex people in South Africa, and includes dialogue in Xhosa and several other Bantu languages. Frameline’s back catalog also includes the feature film While You Weren’t Looking (Frameline39), which is in English, Xhosa, and Afrikaans. (By the way, the language is commonly referred to in English as Xhosa, but the endonym is isiXhosa. Also note that the letters X, C, and Q represent a click sounds with no equivalent in English. The prefix isi indicates a language, as opposed to amaXhosa, the Xhosa people, and kwaZulu, in a closely related language, meansing homeland of the amaZulu people, although the term kwaXhosa is not widely used.)
If you make it through the slow buildup in the first half hour, Black Burns Fast is a fun ride with characters you can relate to, and it’s an important voice from an underrepresented community, as well as a harbinger of a promising new director. For those reasons, I’m elevating it to must see.
Note regarding subtitles: The entire film is fully subtitled (open captioned), which is necessary because several of the characters switch back and forth between English and Xhosa, sometimes several times within a single sentence.
• IMDb • Official website • Filmmaker • Instagram • Facebook • preview • Letterboxd •
• note: the Frameline online program guide incorrectly lists this as a North American premiere •
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