After facing early rejection at age 13, South African filmmaker Ma-Afrika Setona moved to Los Angeles, earned a BAFTA-nominated thesis film, and is now developing her debut feature, Mandla Man.
Ma-Afrika Setona was only 13 years old when she pitched her first film idea and got rejected. More than a decade later, sitting in Los Angeles as a graduate of the New York Film Academy with a Bafta-nominated thesis film to her name, she's not calling it a rejection anymore.
"That wasn't really rejection; it was redirection," she says, "because I'm here now."
Setona has been based in LA for four years, having moved from SA at 18 to study film. It wasn't the plan her upbringing suggested.
“I thought I was going to do something more like going into medicine because, growing up in South Africa, film wasn't really taken that seriously," she says.
It was Setona’s mother who pushed her towards that first pitch at one of South Africa's biggest broadcasters when she was 13 and a 24-hour film challenge in grade 11 that sealed the deal.
"That's when I specifically started researching, okay, what actually is film," she says. "I really do want to direct. I really want to share my dream."
Her parents didn't come from the film industry. Her father is an engineer and lawyer, her mother a fashion designer who'd gone against convention herself.
"She told me: ‘You can always make a career out of something you're passionate about,’" Setona says.
She's the middle of three sisters. The youngest, now 12, is at home in South Africa while the eldest is studying architecture in London, UK.
Arriving in LA as a freshly-turned-18-year-old wasn't easy.
"I was even scared to go outside and explore," she admits, recalling the anxious weeks before classes started. There were the usual culture-shock questions too about accents, "exotic pets" and whether she "spoke South African".
But the New York Film Academy, an accelerated three-year bachelor's programme with no real breaks, gave her the technical grounding and the international network she needed.
"I know a lot more now about filmmaking that I didn't know before when I started," she says.
Her thesis film, Trouble Child, is the same story she first pitched at 13. It’s about a girl weighing whether to leave home because of an abusive father, set against South Africa's reckoning with gender-based violence.
"The topic is still relevant to this day," she says, "and it's been almost close to 10 years."
Shot primarily in Setswana with some English, and filmed entirely in her hometown of Rustenburg with crew brought in from Johannesburg, the film was later selected by the faculty for Bafta submission. It was an achievement she calls deeply affirming.
"I was feeling a little bit doubtful about my journey," she says. "I have to continue, I have to work harder so that I can have results like this."
Writing across cultures wasn't without friction. Table reads with international classmates meant reworking dialogue so American audiences could follow the Setswana-English blend.
"I had to explain to them why it was the case," she says, "because at the end of the day, my film was still going to premiere here in the United States."
Setona is developing her debut feature, Mandla Man. The film is named for a South African childhood game and is set in pre-colonial South Africa and leaning into horror by way of nursery rhyme The way "horror movies like to play with nursery rhymes and make something good too bad", Setona adds.
She's deep in research on the period's architecture, dress and dialect, wanting to build a world drawn from her own upbringing. "You write what you know," she says. "This is what I grew up on."
Beyond her own projects, she's picked up experience working alongside writer-director Kerry Mondragon on the Armie Hammer, Billy Zane and Tyrese Gibson-fronted Mascotland under Unfiltered Pictures and on an as-yet-undisclosed production with Angela Bassett under a non-disclosure agreement.
Among her influences, she names Mmabatho Montsho. "It's very hard to break out as a female director. This industry is very male dominated." She also names cinematographer-director Kagiso Sam Leburu, who she says spotted something in her early. "It's very telling of the person that you will become," she recalls him saying.
For a filmmaker who started with a rejection letter at 13, the redirection seems to be working out just fine.
