With the exception of Lionel Rogosin’s 1959 film “Come Back Africa”, Shawn Slovo’s A World Apart (a thinly veiled account of her family’s anti-apartheid activism and the price they paid; in real life, her mom was later assassinated by Apartheid’ secret police in Mozambique) and Oliver Schmidt’s “Mapantsula” (about a petty thief drawn into politics), most films about Apartheid, whether made by South Africans or outsiders, can’t get it right. Most recent examples of the latter are big budget films, Cry The Beloved Country, Red Dust (CORRECTION: actually based on a novel by Gillian Slovo, Shawn’s sister and not Shawn as I originally suggested. Thanks David Ansara for correcting me), and In My Country (this was particularly bad).
I am not talking about documentaries here. The best films about Apartheid are documentaries. About that another time.
But back to fiction films.
Case in point: Shamim Sarif’s “The World Unseen,” shown at festivals and having some public showings. Writer Sarif decided to adapt and direct the feature film version of her own novel. The film has a lot going for it. It’s the story of a 1950s lesbian affair between two Indian woman in Cape Town. “There’s no denying the richness of the material or the uniquely Indian perspective on a story traditionally told in either black or white,” writes Kamal Al Solaylee in Toronto’s Globe and Mail.
However, as both Solaylee (“surprisingly lacking in drama,” “unseen, unfelt, undeveloped”) and Jeanette Catsoulos in a short review in The New York Times (“trembling soap,” “characters drawn so thinly that they’re almost transparent”), suggests the film is a disappointment.
Sadly, I will have to keep on waiting for the cinematic heirs to Come Back Africa and Mapantsula.
Um, isn’t it Gillian Slovo??