Rise Review: A Quiet, Powerful Portrait of Mentorship and Resilience

A review of Rise, Jessica J Rowlands’ Zimbabwe-set film exploring mentorship, resilience and dignity through boxing, community and powerful performances in Victoria Falls (image source)

Jessica J Rowlands’ Rise is a film that arrives softly and then takes hold — a quiet but unrelenting study of survival, mentorship and the small acts that restore dignity. Filmed entirely in Victoria Falls and rooted in the real-life work of boxing coach Tobias Mupfuti, the film eschews spectacle for intimacy, allowing its emotional power to accumulate through precise performances, careful composition and a deep respect for place.

At the centre is Sikhanyiso Ngwenya as Rise, a boy whose battered body and wary eyes tell a story before a single line of dialogue. Ngwenya’s performance is astonishing in its immediacy, inhabiting the role with raw honesty that never slips into melodrama. Opposite him, Tongayi Chirisa delivers a restrained, inward-looking performance as Tobias, a withdrawn coach who has retreated from the world. His Tobias is defined by silence and guarded gestures, and the chemistry between mentor and student unfolds as a fragile negotiation of trust rather than a neat redemption arc.

Rowlands directs with notable restraint, resisting overt exposition or didactic social critique. Instead, the film’s world reveals itself through texture and detail: cracked township streets, communal rhythms, and the way light settles on corrugated roofs. This is a Zimbabwe that feels lived in, neither romanticised nor reduced to scenery. Cultural specificity becomes a strength, with community portrayed as a living force that can both sustain and strain its most vulnerable members.

Technically, Rise is assured and thoughtful. Jacques Naudé’s cinematography favours close, tactile framing that captures the intimacy of training sessions and the bruising reality of street life, while measured wide shots give the landscape space to breathe. The boxing sequences balance brutality with grace, following bodies as they relearn control, discipline and agency. Max Uldahl’s sound design, complemented by the use of local music, deepens the film’s sensory texture, allowing ambient sound and rhythm to carry emotional weight.

The film’s thematic core interrogates what happens when formal institutions fail children and how informal networks — coaches, neighbours, community figures — become the scaffolding that keeps them afloat. Rise asks whether mentorship can function as a form of repair, and whether dignity can be reclaimed through discipline, care and mutual recognition. It offers no easy resolutions, but insists on the moral urgency of seeing and being seen. A minor flaw emerges in moments where Chirisa’s accent drifts into a broader pan-African register, briefly disrupting the film’s otherwise meticulous authenticity, though this does little to blunt its emotional impact.

Rise lingers because it trusts the audience to feel rather than be instructed. Its final match resonates not through triumphalist scoring, but through the quiet transformations that precede it — a boy who insists on being named, and a man who finally chooses to answer. In the context of a growing Zimbabwean cinema, Rise stands as a signal work, proving that subtlety and specificity can travel far, and that stories of resilience, when told with care, can open doors to wider recognition.