ALEXANDRA DODD

So here is the twist. The film has been screened. How now to speak? What words to introduce into the wordless, auratic aftermath of hypha and still sustain its hypnotic spell? Perhaps this is not possible. Nor is it necessary to preserve the mood and cinematic technics of the gone moment. The film has been screened. Preservation is not our objective here.

What I experienced through watching and listening to hypha is a sustained, sensorial insistence on the inward turn. Even if the trance has now been broken, it is my desire here to stay with that durational, incantatory insistence on the inward turn. How is that pressure established and to what end? What kinds of specific, pressing, self-reflexive questions arise from the dark, subconscious loam into which the film’s play of light leads us?

The habit of self-composting—undoing and remaking ourselves over and over—seems vital in the context of a conference that ‘foregrounds decay as a central concern of heritage studies’, because how can we come to terms with institutional, artefactual and political ‘ruination and regeneration’ if we can’t acknowledge and welcome in these often quite terrifying metabolic cycles in ourselves?

hypha takes us directly into this terrain. On first impressions, it’s a film about childhood, family-life, youth and innocence—the lostness and pastness of these things. But, for me, it’s also about the power of aesthetics in normalising separatist, supremacist ideologies in the most intimate spaces of our life experience.

Aryan Kaganof made hypha using found footage from the Hidden Years Music Archive, and original composed music by Cara Stacey, which draws inspiration from decaying archival material in the same archive—an extraordinary personal collection of countercultural music from a period when apartheid segregation and censorship were at their height. Hypha remains true in every sense to the countercultural spirit of that archive.

The film opens with a little blonde girl in red dungarees and a striped jumper playing with her toy horn and passing time in the garden of a suburban house. Associations of voice, music, expression, making a noise. Girl can’t fit key into front door. She is shut out, can’t get access. Segue to scene of girl and younger brother playing on railway tracks. Must be Johannesburg. There is Ponte. The Hillbrow Tower. Familiar. Boy has no pants on. Extreme vulnerability. Soft, naked buttocks and genitalia. Brut architecture and industrial infrastructure. Girl holds hand of little brother. Precarity | Protection.

Film segues to various sequences of family life. Mummy playing with children in waves on shoreline. Sea, lake, swimming pool, ripples, splashes, water, collective unconscious. Mummy coddling baby with doll. Older child displaced from full affection of parent by central presence of baby. Beginnings of sibling rivalry. Moods and tantrums. Daddy teaches son to swim and fish. Family plays with dog in garden of holiday house. Could be Transkei. Baby stares bewildered at camera. Older children smile and perform happiness for camera. Children on slide, children on swings, ring-a-ring-a-rosy, leisure and games. Amenities, gardens, hibiscus, lawns, ducks. Private life, cocoon, primacy of family. Nobody else matters. Family exits house together, poses in garden with dog. Film skips, jumps, blurs. Film burn leaches across screen.

The film opens up always pressing questions around mortality and the passage of time. Who are these people? Are they still alive? Even as the ghostliness of their presence lingers, the documentary specificities of the found footage gives way to an archetype of family and the early experiences of childhood that shape our psyches. But this is not childhood in general. This is a particular kind of childhood. It is white South African childhood. And it is white South African childhood of a very particular era.

The medium is the message and in this instance it is found footage shot on Super 8 film, which was introduced by Kodak Eastman in 1965. The Super 8 aesthetic is known for its grainy textures, dreamy colours and unexpected light leaks. Warm and nostalgic, it’s an emotionally rich medium that establishes an historical affect and implicates the viewer in an impossible yearning.

Super 8 is usually a silent medium, but, here, the unpredictability of the music establishes a discordant psychic landscape, prompting criticality and vigilance. Cara Stacey is a devotedly experimental multi-instrumentalist and composer whose improvisations actively intercede in our listening. The uncanny swells and surges in the music militate against being lulled into the false idyll of nostalgia.

Never forget that the 1960s and 70s were the height of apartheid and Super 8 film was the medium du jour of home movies among middle-class white South Africans.

Kaganof is an emphatically experimental filmmaker and writer, a committed interdisciplinary field crosser and rigorous tester of forms and ideas. As well as being the curator and editor of the digital publication herri—an astonishing site of decolonial praxis in action —he has been an artist in residence in the STIAS Effects of Race project here at Stellenbosch University, a project set up to address major gaps in our knowledge on race thinking and racialism. I mention these things because I believe they provide cues as to how to read the film. Kaganof’s very biography stands as a provocation—not to be wholly taken up by the heady lure of nostalgia in the film—to think beyond the limits of the frame.

These cues and provocations are wholly supported by the materiality of the film itself: the chromatic fallout, the jump cuts, the blurring, the bleeding red lines of the Kodak-branded film stock… These meta-textual markers direct the viewer’s attention away from the spell of content to the form and construction of the film itself, and to what lies outside of the frame.

In this sense, I’m keenly reminded of the 2023 historical drama The Zone of Interest, written and directed by Jonathan Glazer, loosely based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis. The film focuses on the life of German Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig, who live with their family in an idyllic home in the ‘Zone of Interest’, next to Auschwitz concentration camp. Höss takes the children out to swim and fish, and Hedwig spends time tending the garden. Beyond the garden wall, gunshots, screaming, and the sounds of trains and furnaces are often audible.

There are moments in hypha that hint at realities beyond the family home, the garden and the vibracrete wall. There is the almost undetectable instant when, for a few seconds, a man in a uniform appears to be chasing after two black people, and there is the incidental presence of a black child in the corner of the frame in the sequence where the children are playing on the swings.

Outside of the closed and cosseted system—the seething micro-culture—of the white nuclear family lie the hidden realities of the entire apartheid apparatus. The unseen and unspoken flipside of the apparently idyllic and protected white childhood we see in the film is 16 June 1976, when police opened fire on schoolchildren protesting against Afrikaans as a medium of instruction. It happened within the self-same historical period. Sam Nzima’s searing photograph of the young Mbuyisa Makhubu carrying a slumped and bleeding Hector Pieterson away from the rioting crowd at the Soweto Uprising surges to mind.

Another suppressed flipside to the idyll of apparent safety and security we see in the archival footage from the 1960s or 70s, was the South African Border War fought in Namibia (then South African-occupied South West Africa), Zambia and Angola from 26 August 1966 to 21 March 1990, between the South African Defence Force, the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia, an armed wing of South West African People’s Organisation, and closely intertwined with the Angolan Civil War.  

Let’s not for a second be lulled into the trap of thinking that these violent paradoxes and asymmetries are things of the past. Rather, history is a mobius strip. The snake is eating its own tail.

In Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995), Jacques Derrida writes:

The question of the archive is not, we repeat, a question of the past… It is a thing of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow.        

As Vonani Bila, the editor of herri #12 Timbila Library  issue, put it in a recent interview:

The reality for the majority of South Africans is harsh and brash. It is marked by biting poverty, sky-rocketing unemployment, substandard housing, poor access to primary health care, the shocking levels of apathy and death resulting from the uncontrolled HIV/AIDS pandemic, crime, and domestic violence.

Getting closer to the core theme of hypha—the fragility and precarity of childhood—I turn to the haunting spectres of childhood currently hovering in the countercultural shadowlands of contemporary public culture. It was impossible for me to watch the film without thinking of the evidence of rampant molestation, sexual abuse and child trafficking by convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his social circle of public figures, politicians and celebrities, recently brought to light by devoted citizen journalists in response to the very partial release of a further three million pages of the Epstein Files in January 2026.

Having closely witnessed the live-streamed genocide of Gaza for more than two years now, I also refuse to ignore the infanticide that has been wreaked by the Israeli Occupation Force and its Western backers. Israel’s relentless attacks have robbed children in Gaza of their right to play safely, their right to a stable family life, to sleep without fear, to protection from violence, to express themselves freely, to get an education and to hope for the future. 

By October 2025, Israeli attacks had killed at least [at the very least] 20 000 Palestinian children, with Save the Children reporting ‘one child killed every hour’ during the peak of the violence. 

Meanwhile, leaked internal documents from a massive new trial have just exposed the stomach-turning truth that Meta knows that 100 000 children are sexually harassed on Instagram every single day—and it does absolutely nothing to protect them. And while Mark Zuckerberg looks the other way, Elon Musk’s platform, X, has turned into a ‘porn deepfake’ factory, with EU investigators having just launched a probe into Musk’s AI chatbot, Grok, after it was revealed that users were using it to ‘undress’ images of women and underage girls.

Of course, hypha doesn’t explicitly state any of these things. These are my subjective responses to the conjurings of the film and the music. For me, this is the spell of hypha—its subliminal conjuring of intensely contradictory and paradoxical memories and feelings. And its capacity to hold them in conceptual drift—in a floating, suspended simultaneity. It is an architecture of light and sound that accommodates self-reflexivity. It gives us space and time to think through the hauntings that run like murky ground water beneath the hypermediated narratives and that bombard our screens and our beings. And it does this with immense tenderness.

For me, hypha is an invitation to meditate on the systems we were born into and grew up in—not just past systems of dominion, but their zombified persistence in the present. To evaluate at a cellular level the extent to which we’re playing our part in reproducing them, staying stuck in old structures and systems of biopolitical power that are not serving the world.

To what extent are we still playing girl, playing boy, playing mummy, playing daddy, playing white, playing human even, enacting these categories in ways that reproduce apartheid, patriarchy, speciesism? The film is a reminder to make time to shed those skins, to keep on letting them go and allowing them to be ground down to inchoate material. A hypha, after all, is a single microscopic filament that serves as the basic structure of a fungus. Hyphae are the main mode of vegetative growth, collectively called a mycelium.

One of the most poignant and affecting aspects of hypha is the persistent blurring in the film, the absence of hard boundaries around the bodies of the figures, which is a reminder that we are not, in fact, separate from the world around us. We are the Earth and the Earth is us. We are the sea, the sky, the plants, the animals and they are us. The fungal deterioration of the film stock, the scratches and blotches and chromatic desaturation, all add to the painterliness of the film, amplifying this feeling of metaphysical unboundedness. The world is us and we are the world.

hypha Film Notes