Palesa Nomanzi Shongwe
Palesa Nomanzi Shongwe is an award-winning South African filmmaker of many “lives”—a television writer, director, teacher and film scholar. She currently works as a freelance story producer in both fiction and documentary forms, while also pursuing an independent research and film career rooted in her interests in film history, personal ethnography, archival research and experimental film forms. She heads up a film development company, UNDERSTORY, which she founded in 2022, and forms one half of the experimental film duo The Detritus of the Day, with fellow filmmaker, scholar and writer Dr. Nobunye Levin. Palesa is an alumnus of the Realness Residency and currently developing her second short, To Dream of Trees, for production in 2025.