BlackStar Film Festival 2025 - SABBATICAL Q&A with Karabo Lediga скачать в хорошем качестве

BlackStar Film Festival 2025 - SABBATICAL Q&A with Karabo Lediga

SABBATICAL: A banker returns unannounced to her childhood home and her overbearing mother, whom she hardly visits. Unbeknownst to her mother, a life-changing secret brought her back, threatening to upend their relationship forever. Tinsel & Tine #minimoviereviews - The title might suggest a carefree hiatus, but in Karabo Lediga’s Sabbatical, time off is anything but voluntary. Mid-thirties ex-banker Lesego (Mona Monyane) played with layered restraint, arrives unannounced at her mother Doris’ (Clementine Mosimane) doorstep in the small town of Thorntree. Her once-polished life in Johannesburg is in shambles—financial regulators have frozen her accounts, and she’s facing suspicion over a risky investment scheme that devastated thousands of miner widows. All facts she has no intentions of divulging to her mother. Instead she claims she's suffering from burnout and asks to stay in her old room for a couple of days. Only Lesego's mother is not the type to give her daughter the space she so obviously needs - instead she's constantly questioning her, asking for money, won't let her smoke, makes her attend a women's group where Doris acts as Treasurer, they ask Lesego for investment advice and then don't take it. The mother-daughter dynamic simmers with spoken and unspoken grievances and old shared wounds. Lediga draws sharp contrasts between generations: Doris, molded by the grit and caution of an apartheid-era life, and Lesego, who came of age in a freer, more globally connected South Africa—seduced by the glittering yet precarious promises of high finance only to have her white colleague throw her under the bus. Any yet Lesego is not a completely sympathetic character, she's shown to be quite self-centered in many instances, particularly the way she carelessly uses her neighbor/old high school friend and decimates the ego of another old acquaintance. And yet it's hard not to root for her, putting me in mind of Phoebe Waller-Bridge's "Flea Bag". The film’s pacing feels American and deftly balances the family tension with the looming threat of legal and public disgrace. #southafricanfilm #narrative #BSFF25