Saturday, May 2nd. Doors open at 6PM, Starts at 6:30PM.

Pay What You Can (Suggested $10)

Growing up, we are first held by the voice of our mothers—its rhythms teaching us how to listen, how to imagine, how to feel our way through the world before we fully understand it. A lullaby can soothe, but it can also shield, shaping what is heard and what remains unsaid. In this opening program, A Mother’s Lullaby, Milisuthando Bongela’s Milisuthando returns to the fragile architectures of such protection, tracing a childhood in the Transkei where the violences of apartheid were both ever-present and eerily obscured. Through a lyrical weaving of memory, poetry, and image, the film lingers in the dissonance between what we inherit and what we later come to know—how love can coexist with omission, and how care can be entangled with erasure. In dialogue, Jeff Parker’s live performance extends this meditation, improvising a sonic space where memory is not fixed but continually reworked. Together, they ask: what songs carried us through, and what truths did they quiet?

____________________________

Songs to Quell the Monster is a four-part programming series that gathers films and live performances that channel the defiant spirit of songs across histories and borders. Moving between the intimate and the collective, these works confront authoritarianism, colonial violence and and erasure–transforming memory, voice and image into acts of refusal. A reminder that while the monster is vast, so too are our songs.

Programmed by Nehal Vyas & Advik Beni