A new documentary exploring how hip-hop has shaped identity, resistance and storytelling in Cape Town’s communities recently premiered at the Encounters South African International Documentary Film Festival.
‘Notes from the Underground’ traces the culture from the Cape Flats in the 1980s to the present day, showing how it grew beyond music into a broader form of expression across graffiti, dance and lyrical performance.
Directed by Adrian van Wyk and Chris Kets, the film took eight years to complete and draws on the lived experience of artists and communities.
“Our film opens up an intergenerational conversation to explore the history, the philosophy and the oral traditions of our city.
“We actually just developed a love letter to the city… this is a love letter to the mountains, this is a love letter to the ocean, but this is also for the people who have engineered and pioneered this amazing platform.”
Van Wyk described Cape Town’s hip-hop scene as a “collage” of histories shaped by marginalisation, apartheid spatial planning and the city’s layered social realities.
“Hip-hop becomes a platform for the unseen. It becomes a space and a place for people who have been subjected to vicious forms of marginalisation and systemic exclusion to be seen and to be heard.
“Particularly in a space like Cape Town, with its histories and deep interconnection with colonial spatial planning, apartheid spatial planning, hip-hop becomes this transcendence across those margins and across those lines for young people and for now an intergenerational audience to experience what necessarily won’t be spoken about within quote unquote mainstream or quote unquote more prevalent conversations.
“It’s the cyphers on the street corners where the real news is happening. It’s the graffiti on the wall where you’ll really see the actual temperature of society. It’s the way in which the break dancer speaks through their body. It’s the way in which the DJ loops the beat that you’ll actually hear what the pulse of society is saying.”
Watch the trailer below:
The documentary highlights hip-hop’s five pillars, including “knowledge of self”, which is used to explore identity, lineage and personal history.
It also features intergenerational voices such as Ready D, Isaac Mutant, and Niko10Long, and reflects on how the culture continues to shape debates around class, language and belonging in South Africa.
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