Writing immediately prior to the political end of apartheid, Keyan Tomaselli suggested that South African and world cinema “has historically played an important role in presenting apartheid as a natural way of life,” and his study in The Cinema of Apartheid (1989) of the extent to which cinema legitimated the apartheid status quo remains important. In recent years, however, a different cinema has begun to develop within South Africa, inevitably concerned with re-imagining an emergent society whose previous self-vision had undergone profound distortions.
Despite the intervening changes in South African society, recent movies distributed worldwide, such as Tsotsi (2005) and Red Dust (2004), appear still to consist in part of “white”-constructed visions of a “New” South Africa, resting as they do on literary works by Athol Fugard and Gillian Slovo, respectively. Alternatively, less-widely distributed films such as Promised Land (2002, dir. Jason Xenopoulos; a fairly free adaptation of Karel Schoeman’s Afrikaans novel Na die Geliefde Land; 1972, English trans. 1978) and Forgiveness (2002, dir. Ian Gabriel); inspired, respectively, by a confirmation of exile—in effect, a de-colonization of the “White”—and, alternatively, by a familiar “Western” genre depicting the death of the anti-hero as a sign of release/freedom from a corrupt past, appear to indicate attempts at (re)new(ed) approaches to social and political ambiguity.
Thus, the paper will explore ways in which recent South African cinema is attempting to confront ethnicity in a multi-ethnic nation.