| Sumario: | The feature filmOtelo Burning(2011) tells the story of black youth ‘tasting freedom’ by surfing waves in late apartheid South Africa and reflects on the emergence of a new national order by drawing Nelson Mandela's release from prison into its plot. This article situates the film in a genealogy of black-centred representations of Durban beach – including Peter Abrahams's memoirTell Freedom(1954),Drumphotographer Bob Gosani's framing of Dolly Rathebe at a Durban beach (1957), Lewis Nkosi'sMating Birds(1983) and the post-apartheid filmJerusalema(2008) – and in relation to international surfing fiction and film – particularly Kum Nunn's novel trilogy and the filmsPoint Break(1991) andBlue Crush(2002). It focuses on the settings of beach and sea, township and pool and teases out the generic scripts that compose the film. A tension between the attraction of the outlaw figure that informs ‘surfnoir’ and the production of theBildungsheldas normative, ‘responsibilitized’ citizen-subject is found to animate this story of surfing and to direct the questions about freedom that it poses from the vantage point of a democracy itself now coming of age.
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