| RATING: | 60% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
A film defeated by its inability to square up to its own themes. Rather than explain the purpose of truth and reconciliation in South Africa after apartheid, this film spends more time trying to appease the fears of the Whites watching the movies whose fears are matched by the White South Africans portrayed in it. The fear is a simple, not to say primeval one. That Blacks who take power over Whites are going to demand revenge: A paradoxical racist view that vainly justifies racism while undermining it - since only a human being can claim the right to revenge yet White racists claim Blacks are not human.
The implicit message of this film is that Whites are inferior to Blacks culturally and spiritually in that the latter have attained true civilization while Whites wallow in a racist past that is now lost to them. Yet this is merely a means of buttering up Blacks in trying to convince them that revenge would not be a good idea in the long run. Yet no matter how civilized one is, can one forgive someone who killed your grandmother or tortured your father or beat your children to death when this was being practiced for two generations? This film is as naive as nelson Mandela's communist politics and as fearful of Blacks as so many Whites. A film that worries about Whites being demoralized by the end of apartheid is like worrying whether the enemy in the tank you have just destroyed experienced any suffering.
This film would have been improved by a Black director who understands the issues better. someone who understands that leopards do not change their spots, that color-blind politics are White supremacy by another name and that Whites are not to appeased when their wrongs need righting. Is there any country in the world where Black and White can say of their one country "We"? There is not. A film about political symbols not real-world politics - especially since the sport purists claim sport should be kept out of politics. If sport brings people together, why has the Olympics not resulted in world peace? Because the feelings- like those produced by an orgasm - do not last.
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