The story of Mother City is a powerful narrative of an urban revolution in the city of Cape Town, exposing the deep fault lines that still exist in South Africa today.
It is also the bread and butter of Bertha’s core beliefs: that bringing people together, specifically activists, storytellers and lawyers is a key ingredient in creating social change.
Mother City is a narrative feature documentary that tracks - over six years - the struggle for affordable housing and spatial justice in one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world. The story is told by Nkosikhona (aka Face) Swartbooi, who offers a deeply intimate perspective on the battle in the streets, suburbs, townships and courtrooms against the legacy of Apartheid spatial planning that overshadows Cape Town’s inner city development. Over 30 years since the end of apartheid, successive governments have failed to build homes for poor and working class families, instead prioritizing profit and property developers' interests and pursuing an urban development strategy that keeps black and brown people on the periphery.
This is where the story begins: In 2016 the government decided to sell the old Tafelberg School in Sea Point to a private developer despite a promise to provide affordable housing there. A group of activists - mainly domestic workers from social justice movement “Reclaim the City” (RTC) - occupy two empty government buildings in Cape Town in protest. Nkosikhona, a social justice activist, is part of a group that occupies an old nursing home on the prime location of the Waterfront on the Atlantic Seaboard. The second occupied building, a mothballed former hospital in the gentrified working class suburb, Woodstock. After years of protesting and advocacy, occupation was the only option for landless communities to be seen and heard by the political authorities.
Mother City traces the practical lessons of the brutal politics of resistance as a team of lawyers, academics and activists spend years trying to stop the sale of the Tafelberg site while local authorities are determined to evict the more than two thousand people living in the two occupied buildings in order to make way for private property development.
“They did not want to see our people … in the center of Seapoint. We are only good to work for them, but we are not good to stay with them in one neighborhood” says occupation leader Elizabeth Gqoboka.
Mother City was first brought to Bertha towards the end of 2017 when Miki Redelinghuys and Pearlie Joubert applied for a grant from the Bertha Film Fund for a “feature length documentary about activists claiming their home in the city of Cape Town.” A year before this, Bertha had begun supporting Ndifuna Ukwazi (NU), an activist law center based in Cape Town - the same activist law center that is part of the legal battle against the legacy of apartheid that Mother City follows. Months before Bertha began funding NU, in February 2016, Reclaim the City; a social movement of tenants and workers campaigning for affordable housing in well-located areas in the City of Cape Town, was launched. The funding for NU covered core support for their specialist, Black-led Law Center and capacity building for members of the Reclaim the City movement, to help them organize and collectively defend their rights as tenants with supporting legal services.
In the following years Bertha continued to be involved with each of these players, supporting their work individually and collectively, ensuring they could continue to work collaboratively - this enabled deep relationships and learnings over many years. Bertha learned a great deal through these multiple and diverse relationships and funding cycles, including many lessons in how to create inclusive and vibrant spaces where communities and activists work together to build a more just city, country and planet.
Mother City speaks to the global story of dispossession and exclusion of the urban poor. It exposes the links between poverty, homelessness, economic inequality and the commodification of land and housing – and illustrates the strengths and the limits of our tools of resistance when it comes to the struggles of land and spatial injustice.
In June 2024 at Sheffield DocFest - the UK’s leading documentary festival - Mother City had its international premiere and the film received Special Mention in the International Competition category. Later that month Mother City opened Encounters South African International Documentary Festival in a line-up of local, African and international films that are making waves and garnering critical acclaim at festivals worldwide.
Mother City has screened at prestigious festivals since the opening the Encounters SA international documentary film festival, including Zurich Film Festival, Göteborg Film Festival, "Movies that Matter" and Africa’s largest and most influential film festival, FESPACO, where it was awarded the President Thomas Sankara award recognizing how Mother City embodies "the ideals of Pan-Africanism, resistance, and social justice – values that are at the heart of the film and the activists whose stories it tells."
Since premiering, Mother City has been shown at nine Documentary Film festivals - with three more already scheduled for 2025. In December 2024 it won “The Best African Documentary” at the AFRIFF festival in Nigeria. Several sold-out screenings have been held in Cape Town, South Africa and globally. You can see where to watch and how to host your own screening of the film here. You can also see how to take action and support those in the film here.
There’s a lot that connects Mother City and Bertha Foundation, both through the story the film illustrates and the behind the scenes of what you see on the screen. Mother City marks a convergence of individuals and organizations in the Bertha Network, by all the actors taking action for the same cause.
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