Cinematic Mountains and the Anthropocene: Visualising Mountain Cultures and Ecologies in Qwaqwa: Place of Barriers and Bridges (2025)

ABSTRACT: Much of South Africa’s cinema has prioritised the human as the subject matter. While this has promoted narratives on social, economic, political, cultural and other aspects of everyday human life, missing from the country’s cinematic purview are films focused on planetary well-being in the context of everyday life. This article makes a case for Qwaqwa: Place of Barriers and Bridges (2025) as exemplary of how the mountain cinema genre in post-apartheid South Africa has shifted attention towards the planet’s well-being. Through a bifurcated discussion of the visual and ecological representation of mountains, the article adopts the Anthropocene as a theory for visual analysis of ecological cinema. It critiques this film as usable material for imagining sustainability, conservation, resilience and regeneration – the new critical paradigms about our planet today – and in cautioning us towards the benefit of rethinking Africa’s biospheric priorities.