Movies: Apartheid

Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (currently Zambia), September 18, 1961. Swedish economist and diplomat Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary General of the UN, dies mysteriously in a plane crash. Decades later, Danish journalist and filmmaker Mads Brügger and Swedish...

A 17 year-old student is forced to get off the fence he has actively sat on all his life to stand up for himself, his whanau (family) and his future in this heartwarming story of identity....

Solomon Mahlangu is a Mamelodi township schoolboy-hawker who, after the events of June 16th joins the military wing of the ANC to fight against the brutal oppression of the Apartheid regime and ends up becoming an icon of South Africa's liberation....

A young man in 1981 South Africa must complete his brutal and racist two years of compulsory military service while desperately maintaining the secrecy of his homosexuality....

Sarah Barcant, a lawyer in New York City who grew up in South Africa, returns to her childhood dwelling place to intercede for Alex Mpondo, a Black South African politician who was tortured during apartheid....

A lawyer takes on a case of a prison guard in South Africa who is traumatized by the executions he's witnessed....

More than 60,000 of Ernest Cole’s 35mm film negatives were inexplicably discovered in a bank vault in Stockholm, Sweden. Most considered these forever lost, especially the thousands of pictures he shot in the U.S. Told through Cole’s own writings, th...

A petty gangster inevitably becomes involved in the growing anti-apartheid struggle and is forced to choose between individual gain and a united stand against the system....

Told through the stories of five former prisoners, this is the story of political activists sent to the notorious Robben Island prison in the 1960s by the apartheid regime, who rise above their incarceration by creating a football league and finding ...

A South-African preacher goes to search for his wayward son who has committed a crime in the big city....

‘The Great Wall has been completed at its most southerly point.’ So begins Kafka’s short story ‘At the Building of the Great Wall of China’, and so, at Europe’s heavily militarised south-eastern frontier, begins this film. In the shadow of its own n...

Who is Wouter Basson? Is this white South African just a respected cardiologist without any blood on his hands or on the contrary comparable to someone like Dr. Mengele? The enigmatic Basson, nicknamed Dr. Death, caused a scandal in 1998. Wouter Bas...

When the remains of an apartheid-era policeman are discovered 60 years after he went missing, a retired singer revisits her past to help with the investigation. But how much does she know, and what is she holding back?...

Concerning Violence is based on newly discovered, powerful archival material documenting the most daring moments in the struggle for liberation in the Third World, accompanied by classic text from The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon....

Kanarie (Afrikaans for 'Canary') is a coming-of-age musical war drama. Drafted into the South African army during apartheid, a young soldier joins the military's traveling choir, and romance on the battlefield causes him to deal with his long-repress...

A South African librarian prepares for the return of the remains of his brother who died in exile....

South Africa, July 11th, 1963. Several members of the African National Congress, an organization declared illegal, are arrested in Rivonia, a country house near Johannesburg. The detainees, along with Nelson Mandela, imprisoned since 1962, are charge...

A rural teacher discovers the harsh realities of his South Africa....

Sidney Poitier and Michael Caine both received Emmy nominations for their performances in this made-for-TV movie. The plot follows Nelson Mandela's 27-year struggle to end apartheid....

How Winnie Mandela went from innocent country girl to a fighter against apartheid....