Under the category “Best Animated Short” it listed the film Apart as one of four contenders.
It also named its director, Pola Maneli, who is South African – and a Nelson Mandela University alumnus.
Maneli, still based in the country, did all his tertiary studies at Mandela University, graduating in 2019 with an MA in Fine and Studio Arts.
During his postgraduate studies, he was a research assistant for one year and a part-time lecturer for just short of two years, a time he says was “one of the more rewarding periods of my life”.
His 17-minute film, Apart, is co-written by celebrated American filmmaker Spike Lee, American screenwriter Jeff Leisawitz and two executive creative directors: Cape Town-based Lubabalo Mtati and London-based Tim Jones, who is also a Mandela University alumnus, having graduated with a BTech in Design and Applied Arts in 2010.
He and Maneli worked together at Boomtown, an ad agency in Gqeberha, for over two years.
Yet another Mandela alumnus is involved with Apart: Laduma Ngxokolo of the MaXhosa knitwear and homeware range, who graduated with a BTech in Textile Design and Technology in 2010, is the film’s wardrobe designer. The African touch is further complemented by South African DJ, record producer and songwriter Black Coffee as the movie’s musical supervisor.
Maneli is no stranger to Spike Lee, who bought the original artwork of the illustration Maneli created for New Yorker magazine’s commemorative Martin Luther King cover in 2023.
But he was not Maneli’s introduction to Apart. Jones was the one who “reached out to me to do the poster for this movie that he had written”.
From there Maneli made the leap to director.
“The movie has gone through a lot of different iterations,” he says. First planned as live action, it became animation, “and then because I had an extensive career in illustration, they asked me to design characters and work on the style of the animation itself. I took ownership of the visual direction of the film,” says Maneli.
The production company was in talks with Lee to direct but there was a scheduling clash with his crime thriller, Highest 2 Lowest starring Denzel Washington.
“Spike seemed keen for me to step up and put my fingerprint on it, and with my background of being a South African and in the visual arts, there was a lot of trust there and so they asked me to direct it.”
Apart, which tells the story of two young boys, Themba and Joel, across the racial divide in apartheid South Africa, premiered at the Tribeca Fim Festival in New York in June. In July it won the coveted Best in Show at the SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Film Festival in Los Angeles, which qualified it as an Oscar contender. It has since been invited to every major festival of note, information Maneli is updating almost daily on his LinkedIn profile.
Spike Lee, actress Whoopi Goldberg who curated Tribeca's animated short films and Pola Maneli
The reception has been astounding. “There were people sitting next to me in the theatre, sobbing,” says Maneli of the Tribeca screening. I wasn't expecting people to be moved in that kind of way.”
He also met Spike Lee in person at Tribeca and “had a lovely time” he says.
“Prior to that we were in a couple of virtual calls during production, where we got his input on how the film was turning out. He's an incredible storyteller with a brilliant mind for structure and tone.”
Maneli, who says, “I’ve been drawing since I can remember”, hit the big time long before this movie.
"It started with an email from an art director at the New Yorker “completely out of the blue”, who had stumbled across Maneli’s illustrations on social media such as Instagram and Tumblr.
His first New Yorker commission was to illustrate an essay looking at civil rights activists James Baldwin and Martin Luther King’s writings as a way of viewing the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in America.
Now Maneli’s client list includes the New York Times, Netflix and Google. His earns his bread and butter by illustrating articles for American publications and, most recently, a book cover for an American novel.
Focused on the “rollout and promotion of Apart, making sure it gets all the recognition it deserves,” he is also in the early stages of research for another animated movie he is developing.
What is fascinating about Maneli is that despite all the glitz and glamour of his life, he is rooted, and oozes integrity and thoughtfulness without a hint of arrogance.
He is filled with gratitude for his upbringing: “I can't oversay how fortunate I was to have a parent who's completely supportive of whatever career I decided to choose. A lot of people don't have that,” he says.
Plus he credits the other creatives on Apart as “the best team I’ve ever worked with” and in an interview with ACM SIGGRAPH, a special interest group on computer graphics, he said: “By the end, I felt like even though it did become my own, it was still something that felt like it was all of ours”.
Furthermore, one moment he remembers from his time at Nelson Mandela University reflects his priorities. It is a momentary conversation in a corridor with writing lecturer, Nicole Collier-Naidoo, while he was still an undergraduate. She was telling him that it is fine to be ambitious and try to do something new and interesting, but that doesn't mean reduced the level of rigour.
The then head of the Department of Applied Design, Professor Bruce Cadle, walked past and added: ‘Yes, tell him: novelty is great but it still has to work’. “That is something that has stuck with me,” says Maneli.
Nelson Mandela University wishes Pola Maneli as well as his alumni collaborators the best of everything in the upcoming Oscar race. Even though, as Maneli says, until the official shortlist has been announced, “it is all just people reading tea leaves”.