Willie Bester, at home in Kuils River, 2025 Photo: Peter Goldsmid

FEELING HUMAN - Willie Bester's Art as Resistance and Affirmation    

90-minute Documentary Feature

Logline: In apartheid South Africa, the son of a black father and a coloured mother experiences racism from all sides but finds in art the means to assert his humanity and gain validation by using his creativity to protest against injustice.

Summary:

“Art allowed me to stop thinking of myself as a nobody.” – Willie Bester

Feeling Human explores the life, art, and moral vision of iconic South African artist Willie Bester, whose scrap-metal assemblages and paintings confront injustice with fierce compassion and creative power. Bester is far more than a chronicler of oppression: his work embodies a deep engagement with identity, humanity, memory, and resilience. He wields art as an instrument of justice and conscience, interrogating how systems of racial, economic, and cultural power shape identity — and how creative agency can reclaim humanity.

The film is as much about the man as the artist, revealing and reliving his life under apartheid. It celebrates the transformative power of art as a catalyst for consciousness and connection. Though Bester’s art emerged in resistance to apartheid, his themes and concerns are universal.

Textured, intimate, and visually striking, "Feeling Human" is structured around critical emotional and political turning points in Bester’s life, integrating them with key events that shaped his journey. It develops documentary form as a conversation between art, archive, and self, thus linking the visual artefact with living and recorded memory.

At its heart, Feeling Human examines how art can become a site of justice. Willie Bester’s life and work embody the struggle against structural inequality and the ongoing pursuit of dignity in post-apartheid South Africa. Through work forged from the detritus of oppression, he reclaims discarded materials and histories, transforming them into acts of remembrance and resistance.

Bester’s art extends beyond his native South Africa to speak against oppression everywhere — most notably in his stance on Gaza. In exploring how art can restore humanity to those history has dehumanised, "Feeling Human" affirms commitment to the racial, gender, and cultural rights of all. It is just as relevant today as ever it was.

Currently in development with funding submissions under way – Please contact us for materials and partnership opportunities.