Nabantwa' Bam (Project 10 - With My Children)

“What’s important is freeing yourself before someone else frees you,” declares feisty mother of two Beatrice Kubheka in WITH MY CHILDREN, the story of her two sons’ quite different lives in Soweto, the township famous for impassioned uprisings against apartheid education. The film explores the lives of Miles, an articulate, welltravelled 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.