About family and community relationships, and how neither ambition nor fate can dent the importance of these institutions in achieving and celebrating freedom and prosperity.

The film explores the lives of Miles, an articulate, well-travelled and still upwardly mobile younger brother, and Nhlanhla, the older, more township-savvy brother who is unemployed and homebound. It seems nothing will stop Miles' rise to success. His mother discovers a wardrobe door he defaced to plan his steady but sure rise in the New South Africa of opportunity, while she urges Nhlanhla to 'read a better paper' than the tabloid he's been nursing all day.

But what links Miles and Nhlanhla is more than just that one is seemingly successful and the other a victim of circumstances. They were born of a formidable matriarch whose extended family loves her dearly. In Mama Beatrice there is a life clearly overflowing, with evidence of a freedom claimed and lived long before she was 'allowed to'. Her values shape her children and their children's attitudes to life. The brothers are aware that they are two sides of the same spinning coin – ultimately, one person's freedom is possible because of another's sacrifice.

With My Children is also about family and community relationships, and how neither ambition nor fate can dent the importance of these institutions in achieving and celebrating freedom and prosperity.



Berlin Forum, African, Asian & Latin American Festival - Milan, Tribeca