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Umbilical Cords| 54mins
Director: Sarah PIng NIe Jones | Producer: Jean Meeran
Focus Years: 2012 | Country: South Africa
Subject Tags: africa, communication, conflict, culture, global, relationships, south africa
Quality Tags: Optimistic, Slow, Activating, Harmonizing
Synopsis:
Living together in a flat in Cape Town, Mayra, Zanele and Sarah keep in touch with their mothers by phone. Anna-Maria, Tsepiso, and Hilary all share an intense love for their daughters, and will often call them from their homes in Johannesburg, Gaborone and London. Whenever the phone rings in the flat, a mother is usually at the other end. Conversations flow forth in Spanish, Sotho and Mandarin, about food, sleep, and health; always with a pinch of career advice where deemed necessary. Yet beneath these daily conversations lies years of conflict. Based on interviews shot over three years, in all the above locations, a complex web of love and pain develops. Unconditional love is challenged, and the darkness of the relationship between mothers and daughters emerges. Tsepiso describes the rigorous strictness she enforced on her daughters as they grew up, watching every movie they ever watched with them, and shuttling them between school and a very Christian home, never allowing them out of these environments. The audience learns of Zanele’s multiple identities; lively and outgoing in Cape Town, reverting to a good, ‘clean-living’ daughter when she returns home. Sarah’s relationship with her mother is tested beyond her wildest nightmares, as her mother rejects her partner, on the basis of his darker skin. From speaking nearly everyday, they don’t speak for eight months. We follow her to England, where she confronts her mother, and then back to South Africa, where she has to come to terms with the fact that her mother may no longer be a part of her life. Anna-Maria desperately wants to be close to a daughter she built walls against as a child. As an adult, Mayra remains always just out of reach, and there is nothing Anna-Maria regrets more. We learn why this is, and see Mayra trying to come to terms with a disenchanted childhood. This film is about six women locked in a dance around how much they know, and don’t want to know, about each other, with the telephone cord as metaphor for a tangled umbilical cord. Umbilical Cords is a powerful exploration of what often remains unsaid between mothers and daughters, until they are forced to come to terms with the woman at the other end of the phone.
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Sarah Ping Nie Jones

South Africa

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