Sonder

Within neglected multi-storey hostels in Johannesburg’s inner city, Sonder explores spaces inhabited by thousands of men living side by side in surveilled, enclosed environments shaped by class, ethnicity and the enduring legacy of apartheid’s migrant labour system. Here, traditional masculinity, heteronormativity, and patriarchy converge under constant visibility and restricted privacy, where bodies negotiate survival and belonging, while queer desire and trans identities are stigmatised, policed, and often met with violence. Grounded in Black, Zulu, and queer experience, the film mirrors this world through choreography, where movement embodies life inside the compounds—brotherhood and hierarchy unfolding alongside intimacy, desire, and contradiction. The film exposes how structural violence continues to shape these spaces, where masculinity is continuously performed, enforced, and contested through codes of loyalty, power, and fear. Sonder is an elegy for young men shaped by these conditions, navigating identity and survival within systems still defined by exclusion.