When local stories are told through a universal lens, they don’t need subtitles. Keep Him Safe, selected for the Nevada Women’s Film Festival, shows how deeply rooted truths can resonate anywhere, proving that authenticity, not explanation, is what carries a story across the world
GOSEGO MOTSUMI
The most powerful stories don’t shout where they’re from, they let you feel it. Keep Him Safe, a local short film now officially selected for the Nevada Women’s Film Festival, understands that rule perfectly. It arrives in at the film fest not waving a cultural flag, but holding up a mirror.
The premise is deceptively simple: an older sister and her younger brother share a meal. Then the boy says something he’s been carrying alone. What follows is not spectacle, but reckoning — the kind that lands in your chest and refuses to move.
For producer, writer and co-director Nikita Neo Mokgware, the international selection was immediate validation. “Feedback in my industry is everything; you need to know what works and what doesn’t, and now I will be getting that from an international perspective,” she said in an interview.
ROOTED AT HOME, READABLE EVERYWHERE
Mokgware was intentional about telling a Botswana story without over-explaining it. “I was trained to tell local stories through a universal lens,” she explained. The emotions — fear, protection, silence, love — do the heavy lifting. Geography becomes secondary.
That approach is precisely why the film resonated with the women-led, socially conscious Nevada Women’s Film Festival. Mothers, sisters and caregivers across cultures recognised themselves in the older sister’s impossible choice. “Women commented on how the film resonated with them… that they too would do anything to protect,” Mokgware notes.
REFUSING THE AFRICAN CLICHÉ
Crucially, Keep Him Safe rejects the visual shortcuts often expected of African cinema. “We refused to make the set and production design ‘African’,” she says. No masks. No animal prints. Just a modern Batswana home — because universality begins with honesty.
MAKING IT ANYWAY
Shot on a no-budget, one-day schedule, the film exists because its creators chose momentum over permission. That urgency is now part of its DNA — and its global appeal.
Actress Palesa Molefe who is a part of the film sums it up simply: “Botswana’s creatives are taking over the world.”
WHY THIS MATTERS
When Keep Him Safe screens in Nevada this March, it won’t be representing Botswana by translating itself — it will do so by trusting that human emotion travels faster than context ever could.