A third of the way into Mother City there’s a scene that characterises this tough, passionate film about Cape Town and its paradoxes of beauty and hardship, wealth and poverty, and the way it excludes the working poor.
Two women talk in a room, while one has her hair braided in anticipation of a celebration. They are occupants in the former Helen Bowden Nurses Home, an abandoned building near the South African city’s elite Waterfront precinct. The right half of the frame looks through the open window over the sea, where a luxury yacht cruises past.
