ABAHLENGETHWA
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Spirit meets Science
African Dolphin invites you on a captivating journey that highlights the endangered humpback dolphin and it's connection to Nguni mythology.
Immerse in the sacredness of conservation through the lens of director, Fezeka Mkhabela, and connect to indigenous knowledge systems, scientific enquiry and the power of personhood.
Spirit meets Science
WATCH TEASER
African Dolphin
FROM THE FILMMAKERS
"Our story is both an offering and an act of remembrance and a meditation on the intimate bond between humanity, the earth, and the ocean. This film emerges at a moment in my own journey of reclaiming ancestral practices that venerate women, practices eroded by the legacies of colonialism and apartheid in South Africa. I am compelled to tell this story because I grew up with a quiet sense of absence, as though something essential to my identity, heritage, and place in the world as a woman had been silenced. It was the stories carried by my ancestors that called me back into myself, most powerfully, the stories of the dolphin within Zulu cosmology. In it, I encountered a creation narrative that challenged my religious upbringing: one that honours a woman as powerful, and having a strong bond with dolphins. Through this film, I seek to remember that story as I return to the ocean to bear witness to the endangered humpback dolphin, and in doing so, to uncover a deeper understanding of who I truly am."
Fezeka Mkhabela
Director
"This film is more than a documentary, it is a vessel. A current. A whisper from the water to those who are ready to listen. My role has been to guide Fezeka through this journey, not just as a producer, but as a physical companion, a witness, a fellow seeker. She began this work alone, much of the foundation had already been laid when we first began speaking but as time passed, we joined forces and the story began to weave itself through both of us.
I want this film to carry her eccentricity, her signature, her rhythm. My presence is not to shape it into something else, but to help it flow, to protect its essence. After all, these are whispers of the ocean, translated through moving pictures. African Dolphin is a documentary that is rooted in South
African indigenous and ecological practices yet it speaks to universal themes of resilience, identity and social impact. This documentary is a call to remember. A call to return. The Humpback Dolphin, once revered in Zulu
cosmology, is not just endangered in body but in spirit."
Nikita Moleko
Producer