The Mothers’ House is a record of four years in the life of Miché, a charming, precocious yet troubled teenage girl growing into womanhood in post-Apartheid South Africa. Living with her mother and grandmother in a ‘coloured’ township outside Cape Town, she has to face life in a community troubled by gangsters and drug abuse as well as the unbearable cycle of emotional and physical violence imprisoning her own family. Miché’s mother Valencia is an ex-Struggle activist, now an unemployed single mother, HIV positive and about to give birth to a third child. Deeply affected by the world she has grown up in herself, she increasingly shifts responsibility for her own problems onto Miché. Miché has to bear the responsibility not only for her mother’s anger and general health, but also for the emotional well-being of her younger siblings.
François Verster (South Africa) | South Africa | 2005 | 76 min | Afrikaans and English spoken, English subtitles
