ORIGINS: Black Coffee

Before we visited Johannesburg to shoot a Real Scenes film, we’d heard that Black Coffee was a big star in South Africa. But what we saw eclipsed anything we could have imagined. Nathi Maphumulo is a national icon—an artist who has come to embody the creative and professional potential for black South Africans in a post-apartheid world. For the last ten years, Nathi has been producing and playing house music that drips with soul. His style draws inspiration from the indigenous music of his homeland, blended with a love for classic hooks and songwriting. It’s a blueprint that’s helped him inspire a generation of South African producers. All of which makes Nathi an ideal subject for ORIGINS. In order to tell the story of his formative years, we first travelled to Umlazi, a township outside of Durban where he developed a passion for music that would shape the rest of his life. We then spent time in Ngangalizwe, Mthatha, a township where, under the care of his grandmother, Nathi learned some of the harsh realit