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

Pay What You Can (Suggested $10)

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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?

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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. 

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Milisuthando Bongela-Davis (b.1985, South Africa) is an award-winning writer, filmmaker, cultural worker and artist. Her career began in the fashion industry but the last 16 years have seen her traverse the worlds of music, art, media and film – continually turning towards indigenous knowledge systems. 

She was Arts Editor for the Mail & Guardian’s Friday section and was host and co-producer of the podcast Umoya: On African Spirituality with Dr. Athambile Masola. Her debut feature film, a personal essay documentary titled MILISUTHANDO had its in competition world premier at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and selected for MoMA’s New Directors / New Films programme 2023 before opening the 2023 Encounters Documentary Film Festival. It was nominated and won awards for its groundbreaking form, subject matter and approach to personal filmmaking. 

She is an inaugural fellow of the 2020 Adobe Women at Sundance Fellowship and in 2024, she made an experimental silent film INGQUMBO commissioned by Neo Muyanga and William Kentridge’s Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg. 

After a theatrical run at Anthology Film Archives in May 2025, MILISUTHANDO was released on The Criterion Channel on 1 October 2025 and is independently distributed in Africa and as of April 7th 2026, is distributed by The Tape Collective in the UK and  EU. 

She is currently an Artist in Residence at Headlands Centre for the Arts in the Marin Headlands of California where she is developing her second film. 

While she has lived in New York since 2024, the subject of her work is always rooted in South Africa  

​​Jeff Parker (1967) is a guitarist, multi-instrumentalist, producer and composer. A longtime member of the influential indie-band Tortoise, Parker is recognized as one of contemporary music’s most versatile and innovative electric guitarists and composers. With a prolific output characterized by musical ideas of angularity and logic, he works in a wide variety of mediums – from pop, rock and jazz to new music – using ideas informed by innovations and trends in both popular and experimental forms. He creates works that explore and exploit the contrary relationships between tradition and technology, improvisation and composition, and the familiar and the abstract. His sonic palette may employ techniques from sample-based technologies, analog and digital synthesis, and conventional and extended techniques from over four decades of exploring the intricacies of the electric guitar.

Also a prolific collaborator and composer, Parker has released several critically-acclaimed albums under his own name. His latest, “The Way Out Of Easy” (International Anthem/Nonesuch – 2024), premiered at number one on Billboard’s Contemporary Jazz Albums chart, and landed on numerous year-end “Best Of” lists.

An associate member of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement Of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1995, Parker was awarded the United States Artists’ Fellowship in 2022.

Advik Beni and Nehal Vyas  are programmers and filmmakers based in Los Angeles. Originally from South Africa and India respectively,  their curatorial work draws from oral traditions, nationhood, citizenship, mythology, and family histories. They are committed to building community spaces where filmmaking serves as an ally.