A World Apart

The character spends most of the movie's running time between four walls or questioned by evil Akrikaner brutes. The fact that she's a white woman leads her only to psychological torture, not physical. She's finally definitely released after she tried to kill herself, refusing to give the names of the people she 'collaborated' with for her work. During her detention her young daughter Molly (played by Jodhi May), put away from the cause by her mother, discovers for over 90 days all the injustices and horrors all by herself (mother arrested and put into prison, black friend murdered, and her white friends turning away from her, accusing her for treason, including her best one, Yvonne) and tries to do something about it. The awakening is very brutal (in the beginning of the film, she sees a black man getting hit by a car and nobody to help him), and the drama is deep.

The force of this film, which was prized four times in Cannes Film Festival in 1988 (Special Jury Prize, Triple Best Actress Prize for Hershey, Johdi May and Linda Mvusi) is mostly in Hershey's performance. She carries all the film on her shoulders. The script, written by the journalist Shawn Slovo from her true story (based upon her childhood in South Africa and her relationship with her parents), is great, so is the direction of Chris Menges, here in his first 'fiction' film (after winning Oscars as director of photography, for Roland Joffé's films "The Killing Fields" and "The Mission"). The music, composed by Hans Zimmer ("Rain Man"), is the ideal one, moving and dramatic in the same time. This is another necessary film with no DVD release - so far -, good and powerful enough to be showed in all schools, and made to show how the most elementary rights of man can be shamefully and regularly wasted, and how those who try to respect these rights (white people included) are unceasingly hunted and, in most cases, finally get killed. We don't see films like this any more these days...