Kwesta's new music video Spirit is a polarising, visually-engaging film directed by multi-award-winning director, Tebogo “Tebza” Malope.  Shot over 23 hours in Katlehong, Spirit shows the upliftment of a people through images that are symbols of resonance and also aspiration. 

We're taken through the trawl of daily life. Routine, chores and habit narrate the film. We're then shown a range of iconography - images of  religion, tradition, a youthful carefree-ness and sports cars. The symbiotic nature of these montages and their ideas mirror each other constantly through the video in movement and pace. All these elements add to a somewhat poetic narrative used in the film. 

“It was more like a meditation on what it’s like to grow up in the hood,” director Malope shares. “The first part of the harmony is about where we come from. The struggle, a bit of that previously-disadvantaged burden that we constantly carry with us. The second part of the harmony is where we are now: somehow we find a way to keep the spirit up and try to make things happen. The third aspect of it is the aspirational aspect that shows that it’s inevitable for us as a people to make it.”

“The subtext of those three levels are like this,” Malope explains. “The first harmony about where we come from is represented by the spirit in a religious and cultural context. The second bit was the spirit of the hood hustle, in the sense that there’s a guy who rolls and spins his car to entertain people or the guy who washes the taxi on the side of the road for an extra buck. The third one, which is the aspiration one, is primarily represented by the hip hop iconography: the super cars, the popping of champagne and making it rain with money, the girls, the fancy clothes at the club, the smoking of the hubbly. I wanted to use very typical hip hop iconography to represent that.”

At the end of the 4:25 minutes, you're left with a strange numbness, met with the onslaught of our South African past and the strong iconographies that make us South African. Not to mention the film's remarkable technical edit and grade which overall adds to its uniqueness. Ultimately it's a romantic and thought provoking love letter to South Africa and the resilient spirit of its people.

You can see the video here: