At a time when African cinema often feels pressured to either moralise or monumentalise, Finding Optel is refreshingly modest, not an epic, not a statement, just a slice of community life told with affection and humour.
By Joseph Jonathan
Nigerian pop star, Wande Coal, once sang, “And that one thing go lead to something”, in his 2009 hit, “You Bad” (feat. Dʼbanj) — a deceptively playful line that captures a universal truth: how the smallest events can spiral into something unexpectedly profound. That sentiment lies at the heart of Finding Optel, the debut feature from South African sibling duo, Jesse and Mikayla Joy Brown.
In Finding Optel, a missing dog becomes the unlikely key to unlocking a small Cape Town community’s quiet tenderness. It’s a deceptively simple premise: a teenage girl’s search for a stray that no one else seems to care much about. Yet behind the film’s pastel palette, comic energy, and whimsical tone lies something that South African cinema doesn’t often allow itself — a portrait of ordinary life painted with affection rather than spectacle.
At first glance, Finding Optel fits neatly into the lineage of feel-good “neighbourhood” mysteries like Enola Holmes (2020) or The Kid Detective (2020). Claire Abrahams (played with disarming sincerity by Mikayla Joy Brown) is sixteen, precocious, and slightly awkward: the sort of character whose curiosity often gets her into trouble. When Optel, the local stray dog, goes missing, she takes it upon herself to find him. The search, however, becomes less about the dog and more about rediscovering connection in a fractured world.
But what makes Finding Optel distinctive — and quietly radical — is how it treats its smallness. Where much of South African cinema has leaned into grand narratives of crime, trauma, and urban violence, the Browns turn their camera toward the soft underbelly of suburban life.
Their Cape Town is not the cinematic playground of action or despair; it’s a living, breathing community of chatter, laughter, and shared histories. Gossip spreads faster than news, neighbours peek over fences, and Aunty figures like Zenobia Kloppers’ Aunty Doreen anchor the story with warmth and humour.
In doing so, Finding Optel engages in a subtle act of cultural reimagination. The film reframes Coloured identity not through the lens of deprivation or danger but through community, empathy, and whimsy. It rejects the cinematic shorthand that has too often reduced South African working-class life to either sociological case study or comic stereotype. Instead, it finds beauty in the banal — the pink diary tucked under Claire’s arm, the chocolate eclairs cooling on the counter, the cramped living rooms filled with mismatched furniture and love.
Visually, the film flirts with a handcrafted aesthetic reminiscent of Wes Anderson, with deliberate symmetry, pastel hues, and meticulously composed frames. But where Anderson’s worlds are built to highlight artifice, Finding Optel uses its stylisation to affirm texture — the way colours can hold memory, or how clutter can signal life.
Paul Guyeu’s cinematography glows with the warmth of nostalgia, while Tiffany Matthews’ production design transforms domestic space into a site of intimacy and wonder. There’s a kind of modest visual poetry here: the film doesn’t seek to impress, only to linger.
Still, Finding Optel isn’t without its flaws. Its ambition for quirk sometimes outruns its emotional coherence. The voice-over narration — flat and tonally dissonant — distances us from moments that should pull us closer. Some of the humour feels overly rehearsed, and the film’s midsection drifts into subplot detours that sap narrative tension.
The tonal shifts between the light-hearted mystery and Claire’s deeper grief don’t always land. Yet, even in these uneven moments, one senses sincerity — a filmmaker’s unguarded belief in the restorative power of small joys.
The Browns’ approach to grief is especially telling. Finding Optel never names its sadness outright, but it sits at the edges of every frame — in the silence between father and daughter, in Claire’s obsession with “finding things”, in the quiet ache that follows laughter. This is where the film transcends its genre trappings: it becomes a meditation on the invisible weight of loss and how we distract ourselves with projects, puzzles, and pets to keep from collapsing.
And though Finding Optel never openly claims a political stance, its very existence is political in the context of South African cinema. To insist on tenderness — on telling a story about ordinary people in an ordinary town — is, in a way, an act of defiance against the industry’s gravitational pull toward trauma. It’s a reclamation of narrative agency, a reminder that joy and absurdity are just as valid in defining the national cinematic imagination as pain and survival.
What ultimately lingers about Finding Optel isn’t the mystery of the missing dog but the texture of the world that surrounds it; a collage of people who, in their clumsiness and kindness, embody a collective spirit of care. The Browns’ debut may stumble in its tonal balance, but it leaves behind a quiet assurance: that there is immense value in small stories told with heart.
At a time when African cinema often feels pressured to either moralise or monumentalise, Finding Optel is refreshingly modest, not an epic, not a statement, just a slice of community life told with affection and humour. And perhaps that’s the point: in the search for a missing dog, we find a portrait of ourselves — distracted, flawed, but still capable of love.
Rating: 3/5
Joseph Jonathan is a historian who seeks to understand how film shapes our cultural identity as a people. He believes that history is more about the future than the past. When he’s not writing about film, you can catch him listening to music or discussing politics. He tweets @Chukwu2big.