Tertius Meintjes Movies

Friendship, politics, violence, and personal responsibility meet head on in this drama. In the late 1980s, three young women who are completing their college education share a house together in Johannesburg, South Africa. Aninka (Michele Burgers) is the daughter of wealthy Afrikaners; she is studying archeology and has personally rejected her family's pro-apartheid politics. Thoko (Dambisa Kente) is Black and receiving a degree in education; her family has little money, and her mother works as a cleaning woman to help pay her daughter's tuition. Sophie (Kerry Fox), whose British parents are well-to-do, is studying library science, and unknown to the others, she has taken a very strong position against South Africa's policy of minority rule. Sophie has joined a terrorist group determined to fight apartheid by any means necessary; under orders from the group, she places a bomb at a busy airport in Johannesburg, killing many innocent bystanders in the process. Sophie's confusion and guilt over the consequences of her actions drive a wedge between herself and her husband, a fellow activist, and it complicates her friendship with Aninka and Thoko. Writer-director Elaine Proctor won the Golden Camera award at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival for her work on Friends. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Whoopi Goldberg stars in this musical take on the South African struggles against Apartheid in the mid-1970s, during the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela. An adaptation of Mbongeni Ngema's popular musical, which ran on Broadway from 1988 to 1989, Sarafina! recounts the political coming of age of the title character, a high school girl involved in the Soweto student protests of 1976. At first just a petulant bundle of energy, more interested in boys than civil rights, Sarafina (Leleti Khumalo) learns of the Afrikaaner oppression through the underground lectures of her teacher, Mary Masembuko (Goldberg). Sarafina's mother, who works as a servant in a white household and never sees her children, urges Sarafina to toe the line. But she can no longer turn a blind eye when the government imprisons her teacher and slaughters her would-be boyfriend during an arson protest. Incited to rebellion, the students kill a crooked black constable, leaving Sarafina to wrestle with their decision to use violence against the government's strictures. Ever tightening its grip, the ruling regime would kill 575 blacks over eight months in an attempt to quell the civil unrest. The sober subject matter is leavened by Ngema's jubilant songs and Michael Peters' electric choreography. ~ Derek Armstrong, Rovi