Avumile Qongqo is basking in the glory of the success of The Last Ranger — Mzansi’s first Oscar-nominated film since Tsotsi won almost 20 years ago.
Nobody saw the gritty Cindy Lee-directed short film coming until it was became an Oscars sleeper when the 97th annual Academy Award nominations were announced on 23 January. Just like that, lead star Qongqo’s career took a turn, with her making waves as the queen of local indie films.
Qongqo is no newbie, although she humbly refers to herself as a “film novice”. Much like her indie film’s sleeper hit status, she has had a long and quiet showbiz career, making a number of U-turns on her way to the Oscars.
In the early 2000s, she was a model muse and mannequin strutting the runway for top SA designers. She quickly found Miss SA fame, as first princess in 2005 (Nokuthula Sithole won) and again in 2007 (Tansey Coetzee won). Then, in the early 2010s, she ventured into broadcast journalism as news anchor on ANN7.
Stepping onto the set of her cover shoot, the statuesque actor commands attention, towering over everyone. The set is gushing about her after she wrapped. Yes, she’s a surreal vision frame after frame, but it’s her professionalism and poise that leaves a long-lasting impression. It becomes apparent that Qongqo has had such a long career because of her strong work ethic and remarkable discipline.
“Before my modelling background, I started with drama at school and we had a very strict teacher, who expected nothing but perfection. So when you come to set you come prepared,” she says when we reconnect on the phone almost a week later, after I praise her professionalism. “When I get on any set, I like to be treated as a professional and in order for me to experience that I have to give others the same professionalism that I anticipate from them. If there are going to be challenges, I would rather they be technical and not because I wasn’t prepared or didn’t honour the moment.”
The Cape Town-based star launched her acting career in 2017 with cameo roles in international productions Raised by Wolves, Deep Blue Sea 3, Deep State, and Outlander. Qongqo admits that being in an Oscar-nominated film so early in her acting career was not on her bingo card. As fate would have it, on 2 March, she was at the high-tech home of the Oscars, the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, walking the same red carpet as A-listers Halle Berry, Demi Moore, Timothée Chalamet, Cynthia Erivo, Adrian Brody, and Zoe Saldaña. Qongqo was a golden beauty in a draped Julian Mendez gown.
“That moment is difficult to put into words because it’s incomparable. Sometimes you feel it’s too soon to dream this way because I only got into film in 2017 and still consider myself a novice,” she says. “So I was waiting for a couple more years before I could dream about going to the Oscars. For this to come the way it did and with a film for which none of us had expecting accolades [is amazing]. The biggest stars in the world were there; I was in the same room as them and suddenly they became so human. It made that stage accessible. That’s breaking the ceiling, to me at least. A village girl who could not conceive the possibilities of this thing happening, there she was at the pinnacle of an industry that she loves. Suddenly, it all felt possible.”
Produced by Darwin Shaw and Will Hawkes, the 28-minute-long film depicting rhino poaching and conservation during the Covid-19 pandemic was filmed in 2021 over a period of four days in the Amakhala Game Reserve and Kariega Game Reserve in the Eastern Cape. Premiering at the Pan African Film Festival on 7 January 2024, it had a successful film-festival run, winning multiple awards.
“The crew was not even half of what a crew is on a film set — it was a quarter,” she says. “We were shooting with wildlife around, so — they later told me — at one point there was a roaming lion and we had to be on the lookout. Because we were shooting with live animals, we had to shoot over 20 minutes and had to get our shot in that time. So these were the nuances on this set — being dictated to by the animals. But then there is also the pressure of the sun going down and you have to get the shot.”
After leaving broadcast journalism in 2015, Qongqo decided to commit to her acting dreams. She went to drama school for six months and then did film acting for about “a year or two”. But the acting dream had its roots in high school. “The only reason I took speech and drama in high school was because the other option was biology. I had an incredible drama teacher,” she says. "At one point I thought he was targeting me and he then set me straight to say he thought I had so much potential, so he needed to push me. It was a saving grace for me; my confidence started to build from there and it pulled me out of my shell.”
Modelling started when she was in Grade 10, when her mother, aunt, and cousin took her to audition for M-Net reality TV show Face of Africa in 2001. She was 15 and made the final two. After high school, the Queenstown-born performer moved to Cape Town to further her studies. According to the internet, Qongqo studied law, but this is incorrect, she quickly stops me.
“No, I don’t know where this comes from, when I was doing the South by Southwest (SXSW) film festival [in March] they kept saying that I’m lawyer. I studied retail business management and marketing management Cape Peninsula University of Technology,” she says. “Modelling was fantastic. I was young. In SA, you would realise that as a model they preferred for you to have less of a voice, especially as a Black model. Just show up and if you have a voice, you are problematic. But this is also the same space that accepted my otherness. I’m very tall and I was conscious about that, but in that space it’s praised and desired.”
She notes that Miss SA gave her more of that voice.
“All of it was unearthing me, because at the centre of it is storytelling. Miss SA is not a competition I would have entered. I was doing fashion week as a model and I was encouraged to enter, but I thought I’m not a beauty queen,” she explains. “When I entered Miss SA, I wanted to start sharpening my voice and honing it. But these are not dreams that you announce to others because you are insecure. I wanted to get into acting and wasn’t telling anyone. So I continued with modelling, which is a form of performance because I could get in front of the camera for auditions and commercials. But there was a limitation — I wanted more.”
Since coming back from the Oscars, Qongqo has been taking creative-writing classes.
