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Karolina Domagalska’s film Abortion Dream Team follows activists in Poland assisting women facing unwanted pregnancies.

Miki Redelinghuys’s film Mother City (co-directed with Pearlie Joubert) depicts the social housing movement 'Reclaim the City', led by the activist Nkosikhona Swortbooi, who also speaks in the episode.

These conversations, hosted by NARA's journalist Nojus Setkauskas, were recorded this March at the human rights film festival Movies that Matter in the Hague, the Netherlands.

Baywatchers in Poland: Abortion Dream Team and the fight for bodily autonomy

In 2020, former journalist and first-time filmmaker Karolina Domagalska picked up a camera as tens of thousands of people in Poland took to the streets protesting against a near-total abortion ban introduced by the country's Constitutional Court. Women’s Strike became the biggest civil resistance movement in democratic Poland.

Eventually, she made a film that follows a group of Polish activists, who provide women with information via a phone helpline, supporting them in performing self-managed abortions at home, and directing them to clinics abroad. The film poster depicts the activists as lifeguards from the 90s TV series Baywatch, joking that the activists are coming to save Poland.

The film portrays not only society's polarisation around the topic but also reveals the psychological toll on activists who assist around 94 women per day.

The sold-out screenings of Abortion Dream Team at Movies that Matter festival were followed by many laughs in the audience, which was one of Karolina’s main goals. She added that during the film festival she found a connection with the audience members from countries such as Colombia or South Africa.

Abortion rights remain an evolving issue in Poland. The country’s newly elected president, Karol Nawrocki, holds a firm stance against it, meaning that the hopes to liberalize abortion rights are put on hold.

Reclaiming the city: Housing and racial justice in Cape Town

Cape Town’s gentrification crisis is stark. Over 23,000 homes have been turned into Airbnbs. Together with the influx of digital nomads, this has raised the property prices, leaving most Capetonians unable to afford to live in the city. 'This [issue] is not theoretical for us,' says activist Nkosikhona Swartbooi, the protagonist in the film Mother City. 'It's one that has a deep, violent history of displacement and dispossession.'

The apartheid government in the 1960s started forcefully displacing around 3.5 million Black Africans from the city to the outskirts of Cape Town. This history shapes the city's social structure to this day.

In 2016, the activists from the movement 'Reclaim the City' occupied the abandoned Tafelberg school in Sea Point, Cape Town, "probably the primest piece of land on the African continent", after it was sold to a private developer despite earlier promises to convert it into affordable housing. Over the next six years, documentary filmmaker Miki Redelinghuys and journalist Pearlie Joubert had been chronicling some of the most critical moments in Cape Town’s housing struggles.

The documentary Mother City gives a glimpse of the 'Reclaim the City' campaign's strategic planning, as well as serious and sometimes humorous techniques used by the activists. The difficult watch expresses the emotional impact of racial and wealth inequality in present-day Cape Town.

For filmmakers and activists alike, human rights film festivals are significant platforms to raise awareness and foster dialogue between affected communities and policymakers. Some notable European festivals that are part of the Human Rights Film Festival Network are The One World (Prague), FIFDH (Geneva), Inconvenient Films (Vilnius) and Movies that Matter (The Hague).

This NARA podcast episode, just like an earlier conversation from Movies that Matter with filmmaker Tommy Gulliksen, captures the urgency and hope that persists in these festivals. Listen to the full episode at the player above.

Further reading:

• On March 8, Abortion Dream Team opened AboTak, Poland’s first abortion “clinic”, right across from the Sejm in Warsaw. Read more about the activists’ fight against violent anti-abortion protestors here.

• Amnesty International article explains the conviction of Polish activist Justyna Wydrzyńska, who was sentenced to eight months of community service for sending abortion pills to a woman in an abusive relationship.

• “A People's Guide to Housing” by the legal team Ndifuna Ukwazi. This guide explains different types of housing and housing programmes present in South Africa.

• Legal Geographies of “Community” in South Africa and the Tafelberg case (a children’s story). An illustrated nine-page children’s book reveals the tensions between community identity, spatial justice, and land use in post‑apartheid South Africa. (Author Sonya Cotton)