Mother City (2024)

• social
• political

Logline

The film follows the activists over several years as they make one of the inner city’s abandoned spaces their home, and use it as a base from which to lobby for the needs of Cape Town’s working class. Beautifully observed, Mother City is a deeply human look at the politics of urbanism.

Plot Summary

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 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 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.