MOTHER CITY
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MOTHER CITY exposes the deep fault lines that still exist in South Africa because successive governments since 1994 have not offered solutions to the most urgent and explosive issue of land and ownership rendering generations of working class people still homeless. The documentary follows activist Nkosikhona Swartbooi over six years as he evolves from a young activist to a father trying to balance his political work with his family responsibilities. MOTHER CITY is vintage David and Goliath: activists taking on property power and politics in a city still disfigured by spatial apartheid 30 years into democracy.
German premiere
MOTHER CITY Direction: Pearlie Joubert, Miki Redelinghuys, DCP, OmeU, 102 min
Guests
Kethiwe Ngcobo has been in the film and television industry for 30 years. She runs a production company called Fuzebox in South Africa and has produced and directed a number of critically acclaimed films. These include BABY FATHERS (1999– eTV) a highly acclaimed documentary about young fathers; HIGH HOPES (TVE, 2000) about young people at the end of their school careers faced with the adult world; NO SAFE SPACE (TVE, 2000) about rape in South Africa; and BELONGING (SABC, 2003) a documentary celebrating 10 years of South African liberation. She is currently working on a series about empowering women to transform their lives, despite poverty, gender based violence and self limiting beliefs.
Pearlie Joubert is an acclaimed investigative journalist starting her career in 1989 at the only Afrikaans anti-apartheid newspaper in South Africa. Having spent years as a news producer for ITV, Channel 4, Sky News and the BBC, Pearlie ended her journalism career blowing the whistle on the biggest Sunday newspaper in South Africa's complicity in enabling the then corrupt state president’s attempts to loot the fiscus. Her latest documentary MOTHER CITY will have its European premiere at the African Film Festival Cologne.