SA filmmaker Tashin Singh’s Sugarcane, Burning to screen in Canada - IOL
SOUTH African-born filmmaker Tashin Singh’s latest film, Sugarcane, Burning, will screen at the International South Asian Film Festival (iSAFF) 2026 in Canada on Friday as part of the festival’s Second Chances shorts programme.
The film, written and directed by the London-based filmmaker, draws on Singh’s family history and explores migration, inheritance and the experiences of Indian South Africans under colonial rule.
Sugarcane, Burning is set in the late 19th century, when thousands of Indians crossed the ocean to colonial Natal in Southern Africa under indenture, carrying fragments of language, memory, and home.
At the centre of the film stands a young woman, Mira, at the threshold of motherhood, suspended between what she has inherited and what she will pass on. Through matrilineal memory, she returns to the presence of her own mother, her touch, her language, her breath, and confronts the quiet ruptures left behind by migration and time.
As past and present converge, Mira reflects on what survives: the names we are given, the words we struggle to keep, and the invisible weight carried forward across generations.
Like the fields that must be burned before they can be sown again, loss and inheritance exist side by side.
The film stars Katishcka Kiara Chanderlal and Sivani Chinappan and was shot in KwaZulu-Natal in October last year as Singh’s London Film School graduation film.
Singh, 30, who was born and raised in Pietermaritzburg, said the film grew from a fragment of his own family history. His great-grandfather travelled from India to Natal decades ago as a stowaway aboard a ship.
"This story began long before I knew it could become a film. Many decades ago, my great-grandfather boarded a ship from India to Natal, hidden as a stowaway. This is almost all I know about my family’s arrival in South Africa. Yet from that fragment came generations of displacement, silence, resilience and longing - a history familiar to many descendants of migration.
"In learning more about the lives of Indian South Africans, I came to understand the depth of what was carried through colonial rule and apartheid: emotional, physical, financial and cultural oppression that settled into families, bodies and land. These histories are not distant to me. They live in questions of who we are, what we have inherited, what was taken and what remains. This film is my attempt to look towards that inheritance," said Singh.
According to Singh, Sugarcane, Burning is a meditation on lineage, absence, and the enduring act of carrying what remains.
Singh began researching the film at the end of 2024 and started writing in early 2025 with co-writer and producer Nicole Magabo Kiggundu. The film was completed in February.
Its world premiere took place in Pune, India, in June, followed by a screening at the London Indian Film Festival a month later.
The film will also return to South Africa when it screens at the FAME Shorts Film Festival in Cape Town at the end of October, marking its South African premiere. It has been nominated there for Best Student Film, Best Costume Design and Best Makeup and Styling.
Singh began in journalism before moving into documentaries in Cape Town. He later completed a Master’s degree in filmmaking at the London Film School. His work moves between fiction, documentary and essay film, often examining personal experiences against wider historical and social landscapes.
"My cinema is concerned with what is not easily visible: inherited silence, the private life of displacement, the emotional architecture of families, the discombobulation of identity and the ways history survives in gesture, landscape and memory."
Rooted in South African experience and shaped by questions of diaspora, masculinity and belonging, Singh is developing work across South Africa, the UK and India.
"My films seek a poetic, formally attentive language for intimate stories marked by historical inheritance."
