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- The Nelson Mandela Foundation announced the new documentary Mandela: Life.
- The series was developed for two years and is set to be released on 27 April 2025.
- Renowned filmmaker Mandla Dube directed it.
It's been 11 years since former statesman Nelson Mandela died, and The Nelson Mandela Foundation has announced a documentary titled Mandela: Life.
The doccie is Mandela's story in his own words, narrated in his voice.
The series, which has been in development for two years, will be released globally on Freedom Day, 27 April 2025.
In the press statement shared with News24, the foundation explained that the five-part series is based on Nelson Mandela's life and the period in South African history from 1984 to 1994, the 'deadly decade' during which thousands of people died in political violence.
The series is created in a world defined by violence, precarity, fundamentalism and division.
This is also the period from Mandela's imprisonment, which ended with him being elected president of South Africa after South Africa’s first democratic election.
The foundation, the official custodian of Mandela’s personal archive, has granted its long-time creative partner and originating publisher of five books with and about Nelson Mandela, Blackwell & Ruth, exclusive permission to create the series.
The publisher partnered with renowned South African filmmaker Mandla Dube as director and will co-produce with his production company, Pambilimedia.
They were granted exclusive permission to archivally recreate Nelson Mandela’s voice from his personal archive and to feature previously unreleased material and unpublished letters written by him from prison.
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"We are decolonising the lens and the framework of who Nelson Mandela was. There are certain nuances and subtleties that we haven’t seen in films made by international filmmakers about Nelson Mandela because there's a certain voice that comes with being a child of the soil," said Dube.
The series was also made in collaboration with the archive and research team Nelson Mandela personally authorised in 2004: Verne Harris, Razia Saleh, and Sahm Venter.
"This will be the first documentary or documentary series that we've authorised as the Nelson Mandela Foundation, and in revisiting his life, especially with the challenge of surfacing his voice, we have authorised the use of archival materials to translate what he wrote to himself into a voice that people can hear. This series allows us to share with the world the contents of archival material that we’ve been searching for for many years and have now found; content in Nelson Mandela's own words, which is very rich and offers new insights into his life," said Harris.
Numerous documentaries and films have been made about Mandela, including Behind Mandela, Nelson Mandela, Nelson Mandela: The Myth and Me, Mandela's Gun and Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, among others.
