ENCOUNTERS 2024: MOTHER CITY

Every year since our founding in 2010, The Bioscope has proudly hosted screenings of The Encounters South African International Documentary Festival. Now over 25 years old as a festival, Encounters returns to The Bioscope once again with screenings from 21 June - 30 July. Tickets are R80. For more information on the festival as a whole, please visit encounters.co.za

SEE THE FULL BIOSCOPE SCHEDULE FOR ENCOUNTERS HERE

MOTHER CITY

Miki Redelinghuys & Pearlie Joubert | South Africa | 110 min

Three decades after the end of apartheid, Cape Town remains one of the world’s most racially and economically segregated cities. As the documentary Mother City points out, not a single home to accommodate working-class people has been built in the inner city since 1994, and Cape Town remains very much an apartheid city. Against this backdrop, the Reclaim the City movement emerged; a collective of dispossessed people who are challenging the notion that Cape Town – and the world’s urban centres – are only for the rich. The film follows the activists over several years as they move into an abandoned former government building on the waterfront and make it their home, as well as a base from which to lobby for the needs of the city’s poor and working class. Beautifully observed, the film is a riveting look at the politics of urbanism from a deeply human perspective.