Early in 2017, Pearlie Joubert commandeered her two young daughters to fill five-litre containers with water. She had just heard on a Cape Talk news bulletin that Western Cape premier Helen Zille and Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille had had the water and electricity to the empty Helen Bowden nursing home and the old Woodstock hospital — n which poor black Capetonians were living — cut off.
“I got very pissed off with that,” veteran journalist Joubert tells me on a Zoom call last week. “I think she tried to flush them out.”
This inspired her and Miki Redelinghuys to make their riveting film Mother City, which has been selected to open the acclaimed Encounters documentary film festival taking place in Cape Town and Johannesburg from 20 to 30 June. It will also be the film’s premiere.
When Joubert and her girls arrived at the nursing home to support the occupiers, she bumped into Redelinghuys, who had had exactly the same idea. ….more
