yandangi

I am Laudika “yaNdangii” Hamutenya, a filmmaker from Ohangwena, Namibia, with a bachelor’s degree in Writing and Directing from AFDA Cape Town. My work explores identity, queerness, spirituality, and the emotional lives of African youth within postcolonial contexts.

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I began writing stories at a young age, and storytelling quickly became my primary way of engaging with the world. When I discovered cinema, I was drawn to its ability to combine narrative, image, sound, and performance into a shared emotional experience. Film offered me a language expansive enough to explore both personal and collective histories — and to ask questions that are often silenced within my cultural context.

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At the core of my practice is a commitment to African storytelling from African perspectives. I am particularly interested in how colonial legacies continue to shape identity, belief systems, and social norms, especially around gender and sexuality. As a queer African filmmaker, my work challenges dominant narratives that position queerness as incompatible with African culture, instead foregrounding histories, mythologies, and lived experiences that complicate this assumption.

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My thematic interests include masculinity, belonging, memory, and intergenerational trauma. I am inspired by filmmakers such as Ousmane Sembène, Mati Diop, and Rungano Nyoni, whose work demonstrates that cinema rooted in specific cultural contexts can still resonate globally. Their films model a practice that is politically engaged, formally confident, and emotionally grounded.

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I see filmmaking as both an artistic and ethical practice — one that holds space for difficult conversations while remaining attentive to character, atmosphere, and emotional truth. Through my work, I aim to create films that are culturally specific yet universally resonant, contributing to a growing body of African cinema that speaks back to historical distortion and contemporary injustice.