Liyana (2017)
Swaziland (now officially Eswatini) sits landlocked between South Africa and Mozambique, and by the mid-2010s the country was carrying one of the highest HIV/AIDS prevalence rates in the world. The humanitarian consequences of that crisis produced a generation of orphaned children whose stories rarely made it beyond the borders of the region, let alone onto cinema screens. Liyana, released in 2017 and running a trim 77 minutes, is a documentary that finds a quietly radical way to tell some of those stories: not by pointing a camera at suffering, but by watching a group of children invent their way out of it. The film takes its title from the fictional heroine the children themselves create, a young girl they send on a perilous quest that maps, sometimes painfully closely, onto their own lived experience. It is the sort of premise that sounds almost too neat on paper, yet lands with a weight that statistics alone never could.
The film is the work of American sibling directors Amanda Kopp and Aaron Kopp, produced through a small but well-connected consortium of companies including Shine Global, Fork Films and the Doha Film Institute, whose backing gave the project a credible international platform without pushing it towards any kind of glossy, crowd-pleasing finish. The Kopps had worked in documentary and social-impact filmmaking before Liyana, and their instinct here is largely to get out of the way, trusting their material rather than imposing a conventional structure on it. The animated sequences, hand-painted and rich in warm earthy colour, were created in collaboration with South African artists and sit in clear contrast to the handheld observational footage of the children themselves. It is a documentary that also functions, in places, as a piece of animated short filmmaking, which makes it genuinely difficult to pigeonhole and all the more interesting for it. If you have read Macca's write-up of Talking About Trees or his thoughts on Once Upon a Time in Uganda, you will know he has a soft spot for documentaries that find unconventional ways into African storytelling traditions, and Liyana fits squarely into that conversation.
The human anchor of the whole enterprise is Gcina Mhlophe, a South African storyteller, poet and playwright of considerable reputation, who gathers the children around her and guides the collective act of invention. Mhlophe has spent decades working in oral tradition and theatre, and her presence here is neither performative nor didactic. She creates a space, essentially, and then lets the children fill it. The result is something that feels closer to genuine collaboration than to facilitated therapy, though it is quietly both of those things at once. Documentary films that centre children from the Global South can sometimes veer into polished but unremarkable territory, presenting their subjects as objects of concern rather than agents of their own stories. Liyana is a conscious effort to do the opposite, and Mhlophe's instinct for listening, as much as for telling, is a large part of why it works. It is worth noting that the film screened at a number of international festivals including Hot Docs and Sheffield Doc/Fest, where it found an audience that responded warmly to its unusual form, earning the Kopps a broader profile than most first-time documentary features manage.
There is something genuinely disarming about watching a documentary unfold not through talking heads or archival footage, but through the vibrant, picturebook animation of a fairytale.
Amanda and Aaron Kopp’s 2017 film Liyana does exactly this, presenting what initially looks like a beautifully illustrated children's story. But the real magic, and the brilliant twist at the heart of the picture, is that this narrative isn't being imposed from the outside. It is being written in real-time by a group of orphaned and vulnerable children in a Swazi village, using the fictional journey of a young girl named Liyana to make sense of their own world.
Honestly, I found the way the kids project themselves onto this brave protagonist to be the most cracking element of the entire film. As they collectively build the story around a campfire, guided by a local storyteller, you can see them processing their own very real traumas through Liyana’s fictional trials. It’s a unique African documentary because it refuses to just pity its subjects; instead, it gives them the agency to rewrite their own narratives. Fair play to the Kopps for stepping back and letting the children’s voices and imaginations take the absolute centre stage, rather than forcing a traditional, Western documentary structure onto their lives.
The execution of this dual narrative is just beautifully done. The transition between the stark, handheld reality of the children in the classroom and the lush, animated world of Liyana is handled with a lot of care. I also have to give massive credit to the audio team, because the soundtrack accompaniment is absolutely great. It swells and dips perfectly with the kids' storytelling, adding a layer of emotional weight that makes the animated sequences feel incredibly urgent and alive. It’s a brilliant piece of audio-visual storytelling that keeps you completely hooked.
This is a deeply moving piece of cinema that proves you don't need a massive budget or a famous narrator to tell a profound story. The Kopp siblings have crafted a gorgeous, highly engaging film that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the sheer power of imagination. It’s a beautiful and touching story that stays with you long after the final frame.
Liyana belongs to a small but growing body of work that asks what documentary filmmaking can look like when it hands creative authority to its subjects rather than simply recording them. In that sense it sits alongside films like Leitis in Waiting and Tiger Stripes, each of which, in different ways, finds form and genre becoming part of the argument. The Kopps have made something that is easy to admire and surprisingly hard to shake, a 77-minute film that manages to be both a children's story and a document of grief, sometimes in the same frame. Whether it fully transcends its own good intentions is perhaps the question each viewer will answer differently. But as an act of collaborative imagination, filmed with patience and genuine respect, it earns its place. Some stories, it turns out, are best told by the people who most need to tell them.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2017 | Watched: 2026-07-21
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Liyana (2017) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Rent: Apple TV Store
Buy: Apple TV Store
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: IndieFlix · IndieFlix Shorts Amazon Channel
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Fandango At Home
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Fandango At Home
Physical: Amazon US
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