Mother / Land

An apparition of his deceased mother appears to law professor, Salim Bardien, in New York on the same day that a massive student protest movement erupts in Cape Town. She comes to foretell a revelation, an invisible stain for him to clean. The news itself—that Salim’s birth was the product of his mother’s illicit affair with a white politician in 1960s South Africa—comes from a newly found half-sister, Bertha. Yet more disorder follows when Bertha reveals that their brother is dying of cancer, and that Salim’s bone marrow may be the only hope of saving him. How can one secret alter—or even redeem—a life? How strong are familial bonds across distances and generations? And how do the struggles of another era echo those of today? As Salim, now a husband and father, wrestles with these questions in the present, his mother Sawligha’s forbidden love story unfolds in the past. Set between New York and Cape Town—across eras spanning apartheid’s forced removals and the rise of Black Lives Matter—and moving through lives, deaths, and the liminal spaces between, Mother/Land is the story of family, and of the world we inherit from those that came before us.