Reactionary Review | Mother City | dir: Miki Redelinghuys & Pearlie G. Joubert
Mother City is by no means a fun night out at the cinema. But, in light of the upcoming municipal elections, seeing this film is a civic duty.
It is a hard and long watch, a recounting of a decade of struggle against DA-led Cape Town city governance, fought by Nkosikhona “Face” Swartbooi of Reclaim The City and by Ndifuna Ukwazi, the NGO that has represented them in the fight over the Tafelberg sale. If none of these names or cases mean anything to you, Mother City is a necessary watch. It is not an easy film, but for those concerned with the future of governance in city planning in any part of this country, it is sobering to say the least.
Directed by veteran reporters Joubert (who I will freely admit to having a lifelong brain crush on) and Redelinghuys, the story is recounted in an ordered timeline of footage captured at all the relevant events over the last decade or so. There is scant editorialising.
When it veers off into the personal, it can feel slight. And yes, slightness is where humanity is, but somehow Mother City, by its very nature, does not quite bring the human fully to the surface.
Mother City is a straight telling of resistance to institutional power and the entrenchment of spatial inequality for the sake of capital enrichment.
Much of the footage was shot by news reporters to cover events, not to capture the people in them; those fragments can feel like B-roll, present but unformed. And the footage that seems deliberately made to foreground the human can feel staged. That tension is inherent in the material’s purpose: some of it was captured as news, some as documentation intended to make people visible to the corporate or municipal power they were confronting. The viewer remains a spectator.
Mother City does not spell out its conclusions, it lays out the events and asks the viewer to make the connections themselves, and in this, it becomes a devastating film. The tactics of corporate and institutional power deliver a kick in the gut, yet there is still hope in the resilience of people who have no choice but to survive.
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