“Think the Clash were rebels? Meet National Wake.” – The Guardian

In 1979, in defiance of an illegitimate, racist South African regime that kept Black people and white people separate and unequal, three young men – Ivan Kadey, a white Jewish guitarist from Johannesburg, and Gary and Punka Khoza, two Black Shangaan brothers from Soweto – dared to launch the trio National Wake together.

In a time and place where it was illegal for these young musicians to play or live together, their band and its fans fought back with music. They smashed every law to rebel – and filmed themselves doing so with remarkable foresight and nerve. Forty years after National Wake was shut down by South Africa’s apartheid regime, veteran New York music journalist Mirissa Neff embarked on telling their story...

Relying on the band’s astonishing archival footage, and audio-only interviews, This is National Wake eschews a talking-heads approach to expertly weave its subjects’ voices into a grainy Super 8 tapestry. The result is a dreamlike immersion into a heady but doomed utopian experiment, whose lasting lessons about imagining an anti-racist world resound as loudly today as it did then.

This debut feature from Neff, steeped in previously unseen footage of a 1970s anti-racist counterculture that few know existed, reveals a band whose music and memories comprise a profound meditation on how history is lived through art and in our minds.

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