Exactly one year ago, US President Donald Trump called Lesotho the African country “nobody’s ever heard of”, and it was in this rugged and beautiful mountainous kingdom that Carl Houston MacMillan made his independent film Cabello.
The Sesotho-language feature film, directed by Mac Millan and co-written by his wife Tara Desormeaux, will premiere this week at the 8th Joburg Film Festival in Johannesburg, South Africa. As a rare Lesotho film, the film was selected as an official competition film at this year’s festival.
“Kabello” is an evolution of the 2017 short “Sir and Kabelo” (The Two Shepherds), starring award-winning actors Warren Masemola and Lebohan Ntsane, and is set in the mountains of Lesotho.
Described as an adventure drama, “Kabello,” produced under Mac Millan and Philo “PJ” Makosholo’s Kabelo Films, the Lesotho caper is currently looking for distribution. The film explores themes of migration, identity, and the search for freedom.
The story is about a young shepherd named Kabelo (Ntsane) who desperately tries to escape his life in an isolated rural village, but then forms a precarious bond with a South African fugitive called “The Master” (Masemola), who promises the young man a new life in Johannesburg.
Mac Millan, 38, who grew up in Lesotho, went to film school in Cape Town, and now lives and works in Johannesburg, set up his own production company to help build a bigger film industry on the “roof of Africa” because, as he told Variety, “Lesotho is so small.”
“Lesotho is very close to me. I love the rural spaces. I feel very inspired by Lesotho. I love nature, I love the mountains. I love being in the mountains. I feel more grounded there,” he says. “This story came very naturally to me because I grew up in Lesotho and spent a lot of time in the mountains of Lesotho, and I have long been interested in the shepherd lifestyle.”
“I remember when I was in film school in Cape Town, I would tell people, ‘I’m from Lesotho,’ and they’d think it was weird – this white guy saying he was from Lesotho. I’d take my friends on hiking trips into the mountains, and there was a time when I was on a two-day hiking trip in the winter and got stuck in the snow.”
“We spent a night around a fire with some shepherds, and it was a completely crazy adventure in a completely different world. It gave me a lot of respect for shepherds, their strength and resilience,” McMillan says. “We found that they were not getting the respect that they deserved.”
A short film followed in which just two characters sit and converse. It was so well received that Macmillan began writing special features.
“My wife and I spent two years writing this. We thought it was a unique story, even from a commercial standpoint, and no one had ever told the story in Lesotho before. Being an independent allows you to really invest your time. We rehearsed for months and really made sure the script worked. When we were writing this, we knew who would be good actor-wise, who we had worked with before and who would be a good fit for it.”
“Nobody asked for this movie,” he says.
“This wasn’t commissioned. We’re trying to get it to places like MultiChoice on Canal+ because we think viewers in South Africa as well as around the world would really want to see Cabello’s story.”
“This story is very specific to Lesotho and South Africans, and the world wants to know the story that’s happening in Lesotho. We don’t get films from Lesotho.”
Bringing “Cabello” to the screen wasn’t difficult in the usual sense, Mac Millan explained, saying, “We have the freedom to do whatever we want.”
“There’s no editor saying, ‘We should use this actor because he has a certain influence or following.’ We get to choose which actor is right for the role and what fits the story.”
“The real challenge as an independent company is now: Can it sell? And that’s the big test. For example, can this be acquired and seen by people in Lesotho, South Africa and the rest of the world?”
His dream, he says, is “to be able to find time to write and produce non-commercial films.”
“I find that a lot of content tends to be very cheesy and very on-the-nose. When I watch a lot of content or movies, or even South African movies, I think: Would I say that in this scene? Would a character really say that? It doesn’t feel authentic.”
“Making movies and telling stories is a privilege. So when I ask myself, what kind of movies do I want to write? What movies do I want to see? It’s important to be true to yourself as a filmmaker. It’s great to make independent movies because you get to make the movies you want to see. And that’s basically what I did with Cabello.”
But it’s not a slow, lingering, high-culture feature.
“I didn’t want it to be too slow an arthouse movie,” he says. “It’s boring. I myself have a very short attention span, so I like things to be a little fast-paced, but I don’t like them to be cheesy.”
The film was filmed over 24 days in the mountains of Lesotho, says Mac Millan. “Lesotho was extremely difficult to lens, especially during the winter, but we used locations and crews we had worked with before, leveraging all our social capital and mountain knowledge.”
The enchanting cave scene on top of the mountain offers some amazing visuals.
“That’s what Lesotho is all about. It’s a beautiful, open landscape. We didn’t want drone shots flying around. We wanted the audience to feel the weight of it. And we wanted them to feel that Kabelo, as a character, is trapped in a place of mountains and caves.”
“I’ve spent a lot of time in the mountains, hiking and biking and working on film projects, so I know a lot of beautiful spots. And the location of the cave was very difficult to access. We had to park the car in the village at the top and walk 30 minutes down into the valley. Then we had a cave that wasn’t on the ground. So we rigged ropes so our staff could climb into the cave.”
So McMillan decided to include a night view from inside the sandstone cave.
“So as an independent filmmaker, that’s kind of a risk,” he says. “That’s risky. You wouldn’t do that on a large commercial project. But we were working with a small staff, and that’s something you can achieve with fewer staff and access.”
“We talked with the village chiefs in advance and hired some people from the village to help us carry it up the ravine by hand, but the preparations took a lot of effort.”
Prominent Basotho musician and shepherd Molina Leraba collaborated on “Kabelo.”
Director Mac Millan said, “The finished feature ‘Kabelo’ looks really beautiful as a postcard of Lesotho. I feel it showcases Basotho talent. With the exception of Warren Masemola, we cast 100% Lesotho. All of them speak Sesotho and we are proud of that.”
“I want Basotho people to be proud of this film and its quality. Globally, foreign language films often feel like low-quality films. Kabelo is a high-quality, beautiful-looking film from Sesotho.”
