MOTHER CITY

Mother City is a deeply human, often heart-breaking and at times humorous look at the global politics of urbanism. 

Against the backdrop of a country celebrating three decades of democracy, 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.

Cape Town, known as the Mother City, lies resplendent between the iconic Table Mountain and the icy Atlantic ocean. A narrative documentary, it charts Nkosikhona Swartbooi leading a defiant war against government and property developers in one of the world’s most unequal cities. 

Our story starts in 2016 when the government decides to sell the old Tafelberg School in Sea Point, earmarked for affordable housing, to a private developer. This careless disregard of the desperate housing needs of Capetonians gave birth to a social justice movement, “Reclaim the City”. 

The stakes cannot be higher. Local authorities are determined to evict the more than two thousand people living in two occupied state-owned buildings in the inner city of Cape Town. Our documentary tells the dramatic story of these residents who do not accept living in the shadows of one of the worlds’ most visited cities.  

For Face, the battle for housing is deeply personal. Raised by his grandmother in a shack in Khayelitsha, he saw the humiliation she faced as a domestic worker in Sea Point: “We have marched, we have picketed, we needed to do something, so we thought: Let’s occupy!” This plan will change the trajectory of Face’s life and our film documents, over six years, how he grows from a young activist to a father trying to balance his political work with family commitments. The story is vintage David and Goliath: activists taking on property power and politics in a city still disfigured by spatial apartheid thirty years into democracy.