How ‘Sebata’ found the beast within

This past weekend, Sebata: The Beast won the Outstanding Film Fiction Award at the 2026 National Arts and Culture Awards. The supernatural crime-thriller, set in the streets of inner city Johannesburg, follows two detectives investigating a mysterious murder that soon takes on otherworldly implications.

I first saw the film when it premiered at the Johannesburg Film Festival in 2025 and it was one of my standout films of the programme. It's an indie film that uses its limited budget with precision, turning the alleys and dark corners of Braamfontein into the perfect backdrop for a movie that maintains a consistently unnerving tone and atmosphere over the course of its 80-minute runtime.

It's by no means a perfect film but there's enough style and substance in it to make for a compelling watch that crawls under your skin and stays even after the credits roll.

The team behind it were led by the husband and wife duo of writer-director Norman Maake and producer Princess Zinzi Mhlongo. The project started life in 2013, sparked by SA's muti murders and Maake's determination not to let the subject be told solely through a foreign lens.

"How do we kind of tell an authentic story from an African point of view?" he asks. "I've seen so many of these stories but they're starring American actors. They're not really personal stories. You can feel that they're just exploiting the subject matter."

That personal thread runs back to his own childhood, split between Alexandra and his grandmother's home in the village. "My grandmother really had reverence for the supernatural," he says. "That world that is sort of parallel to this world but we can never quite understand what it is. That was then my interest in the project."

Over the more than decade-long process of bringing the story to life, there were many team changes, including in the producer role, which Mhlongo stepped into later. Her background is in theatre directing.

Sebata wasn't her first project with Maake. She'd produced Inkabi, the 2024 Netflix action drama about a former contract killer, before taking on this one.

"It was easier for me to engage with producing on Norman's work because he'd obviously work very closely with me to enable me to jump into this huge leap," she says. " Sebata was obviously that psychological thriller that required a lot with a very tight budget. When I came in, we definitely wanted to take it slow, build the team but also balance it with new and up-and-coming creatives."

It's interesting to consider the dynamic of a married couple working together on the production of films like filmmaker Christopher Nolan and his wife Emma Thomas who has produced all 13 of his films.

For Mhlongo, the arrangement works only because the relationship comes first.

"You obviously can't do it if you don't firstly love each other and love the work," she says. "I believe in this guy. And if it means I have to be the one who delivers the work, I'm gonna do whatever it takes."

Maake also sees the value in their dynamic. "A lot of the time films lose relationships because you cannot finance it through pre-production," he says.