In her debut feature film, Sabbatical, South African writer-director Karabo Lediga does something quietly radical: she tells the truth. Not a sensationalised truth. Not one manicured to fit the contours of awards season or diaspora expectations. Just the layered, unsanitised truth of a woman returning home, broken in ways that aren’t easily explained, to a mother who sees everything and says very little.
With over two decades in South African television—as a researcher, writer, and director—Lediga understands the pressure of being a Black woman in the industry, where self-preservation demands precision. That deliberate attention permeates Sabbatical. While she jokes that she turned to directing because of “control issues”, the remark hints at a deeper creative conviction.
The film’s initial premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam drew a deeply personal response. “The most prominent reaction came from mothers and daughters,” says Lediga. “Many said it made them want to call their mums.” That feedback echoed across continents – from a curious European audience to a theatre full of South African film students. Lediga had not only crafted a film; she’d captured a dynamic that was painfully familiar and deeply unspoken.
The relationship at the heart of Sabbatical isn’t defined by explosive conflict or sentimental closure. Instead, it occupies a space that many Black women know intimately: the quiet weight of silence, small but cumulative disappointments, and a mutual love complicated by unspoken expectations. “If this were an American indie film,” says Lediga, “the daughter would scream, ‘I hate you,’ like in Lady Bird. But Lady Bird wouldn’t survive in my mother’s house.”
Lediga’s creative ethos is rooted in subtlety. “I’m always leading with my little spiel,” she says. “I’m looking for the subtle and the nuanced – the complexity. And I think a lot of that lives in what’s unsaid. Especially in Black mother-daughter relationships on this continent, so much is about silence. About what we don’t say.”
That restraint is entirely intentional.
The daughter in Sabbatical is a woman who has failed – publicly and personally – and returns home to confront not only her mother, but herself. Yet the mother isn’t cast as a one-dimensional matriarch enduring suffering; she’s full, beautiful, deeply human. This is a world where shame, disappointment, tenderness, and resilience all coexist, where characters are permitted to live in the grey.
Lediga drew from personal experience. After undergoing invasive surgery while living alone in Johannesburg, she faced a six-week recovery without support. “I didn’t have anyone to take care of me. I had to go home to my mum.” That experience became a seed for Sabbatical, a story about failure and the complicated act of returning.
When fleshing out Lesego’s character, Lediga wanted to explore a very specific kind of failure—one that couldn’t be explained away. “It’s not like losing your job. It’s being retrenched – something that wasn’t your fault. I wanted a failure that carries shame. The kind that deeply disappoints a mother, disappoints a community. But also, this character isn’t a victim. She has agency. She’s not wallowing in guilt; she’s still moving. She just can’t go back.”
This nuanced take challenges prevailing ideas of success. “It’s isolating,” Lediga reflects. “There are so few opportunities to succeed if you’re a Black woman. The recipe is flawed. It’s not freedom.” Still, Sabbatical is infused with love. “That was important to me,” she says. “All the guilt and disappointment had to exist alongside love. This character is loved by her mother, by her community – even when that love is complicated. She loves and resents them in equal measure.”
Lediga explores the generational divide shaped by apartheid and the dislocation it caused. “We have two different cultures now. I had to go and learn Whiteness, and my mother worked so I could do that. When I came back, I was a foreigner in my own home. That’s common in the global South. We return not to new countries, but to our own families, changed.” That return is echoed in the character of a neighbour who never left. She is not portrayed as a failure, but as someone whose life is complete on her terms. In contrast, the protagonist, fractured by her pursuit of success, is deeply alienated in a world that measures worth by proximity to whiteness and financial independence.
This refusal to cast characters in binary roles – success or failure, strong or broken – is central to Lediga’s storytelling. Her characters are not martyrs or heroes, but human, flawed, resilient, and real. This commitment began with her short film What Did You Dream?, inspired by her grandmother’s quiet strength. “I’m interested in normal heroes,” she says. Sabbatical continues this thread, centring Black women not in trauma, but in texture.
Lediga chose to stay true to her vision, rather than shape her film to please festivals or funders. “The rejections have been tough,” she admits, “and I know festivals often expect something specific from African films – but this just isn’t that.” Still, she wouldn’t have made it any other way. “I couldn’t create a different kind of film – it wouldn’t be honest or true to my voice.”
What she has gained is community – in her cast and crew, and in the audiences who felt seen. Independent filmmaking, she says, requires honesty, conviction, and collective care. Even as she looks forward to future projects, Sabbatical remains a vital testament to her voice and vision.
“I made something I love,” she says simply. “That counts for something. Maybe for everything.”
In a world that still demands Black women explain themselves, Karabo Lediga’s refusal to do so is an act of creative sovereignty. Her voice is quiet, deliberate, and unwavering, and in that, many have found their stories reflected.
Sabbatical is currently in cinemas, having premiered nationwide on 9th May 2025.
