Two years after winning the prize for Best Documentary with his film When the War is Over, at the same festival, South African filmmaker Francois Verster has been awarded the Premio Diocesi di Milano at this year’s Milan African, Asian and Latin American Film Festival for The Mothers’ House.
The 76-minute film, which also won the Best Documentary award after its premiere screening at the Cape Town World Cinema Festival in 2005, is a record of four years in the life of Miché, a charming and precocious teenager growing into womanhood in post-Apartheid SA.
Living in a “coloured” township outside Cape Town, she has to face not only life in a community beset by gangsterism and drug abuse, but also what it means to break the cycle of violence imprisoning her own female-only family. Miche’s mother Valencia is an ex-Struggle activist, now unemployed, HIV positive and about to give birth to a third child. Dominated by unresolved conflict with her own mother Amy, she increasingly directs her own problems onto her daughter.
Miché is in many ways an ordinary high school girl: she has her ears pierced for the first time, hosts her first dancing party, and finds her first boyfriend. But having to bear responsibility for both her mother’s anger and health and the well-being of her younger siblings forces her to be strong beyond her years. Torn between escaping abuse by leaving home and protecting those she loves, she takes a wrong turn – before finally coming to terms with her mother, grandmother and the world she lives in.
The Milan jury praised the film “for its commitment and sensititivy in recording the story of a young girl and her mother over four years” and emphasised “the clever use of music”.
The Mothers’ House is a co-production between Undercurrent Film and Television and Luna Films, and was funded by SABC2, the Open Society Fund, the National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), the Fonds Images Sud, and the Sundance Documentary Fund. It has been described as a “coming of age” for local documentary, and is scheduled for a cinema run at the Labia Theatre in Cape Town later this year.
