Cry Freedom (1987)

Waste of time

How sad is this?

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

I think the context of the story has been covered by other posters so I would just like to write about the impact this film had on me.I first saw this film the year of it's release around 1987. My school organised a trip to the cinema to see it, for an RE project I think. We all went along of course excited because we were on a school trip to the cinema! Little did we know what we were about to experience. To this day I still remember the feelings it invoked in me and i remembered crying a lot as were most of my friends. I think at the age we were we found it shocking and quiet rightly outraged in our own youthful way .It had such an impact on me that I joined the Anti Apartheid Movement the same year.I think it served it's purpose in my case.

A long film about a very important character from South Africa, Stephen Biko. He is one of these Blacks who did not survive apartheid, who actually died a long time before their normal time. The already old film though does not show how important Biko was, what he really represented. His life and his teaching is reduced to little, at best a few witty remarks. The film being from 1987, the objective was to push South Africa over the brink that would lead her to liberation. So the film aims at showing how irrational the South African supporters of apartheid are, in 1987. To show this the film has to look beyond Biko's death, hence to center its discourse not on Biko but on a white liberal journalist and his escaping the absurd system in which he is living. His escape is made necessary because of the victimization he is the victim of, along with his family, and because he wants to publish the first book on Biko, after his death, and that can only happen in England. The film shows a way to escape South Africa, while apartheid is still standing and killing. So do not expect this way to be realistic and true. It could not be. But the film has tremendously aged because it does not show South Africa with any historical distantiation, the very distantiation that has taken place under Nelson Mandela's presidency and that is called forgiveness provided those who want to be forgiven speak up and out. The film is strong and emotional but that very historical limit makes it rather weak today, especially since the film does not mention the third racial community, the Indians. Panegyric books or films all have that defect: they are looking at the person they are supposed to portrait from only one point of view. That explains why the film has aged so much, seems to be coming from so long ago, as if nothing had changed at all. A remake is necessary.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID

It's sad to view this film now that we know how the ANC got shafted by international capitalism. Biko died for nothing much. Woods achieved little. Yes, outright apartheid was abolished, but all the apparatus of power was reserved by the minority whites, leaving the ANC government more or less impotent. As Naomi Klein writes in The Shock Doctrine, in the talks between the black and white leaderships "the deKlerk government had a twofold strategy. First drawing on the ascendant Washington Consensus that there was no only one way to run an economy, it portrayed key sectors of economic decision making --- such as trade policy and the central bank --- as "technical" or "adminsitrative". Then it used a wide range of new policy tools --- international trade agreements, innovations in constitutional law and structural adjustment programs --- to hand control of those power centres to supposedly impartial experts, economists and officials from the IMF, the World Bank, the GATT and the National Party --- anyone except the liberation fighters from the ANC." The statistical results are horrifying, with not much change accomplished, and AIDS flourishing. Viewing Cry Freedom in this light is deeply ironic --- actually tragic. The ANC has transformed itself from being the solution to being the primary problem.

There was a great film to be made about Steve Biko. Sadly this wasn't it. Denzel Washington - never the most flexible of actors - is totally unable to convey the great charisma that Biko had. Attenborough's big crowd scenes are laughable. The Soweto massacre wasn't like this, three neat lines of children ( some doing cartwheels!) marching happily into the guns of the soldiers. With Biko dead the film rapidly descends into farce. If the struggle against Apartheid was anything it was a black people's struggle yet somehow we are all supposed to be gripped by the escape of a white man and his family. I'm sure Donald Woods was a decent man and he would be the first to say that Biko was important while he wasn't. Penelope Wilton's accent is pure Hampshire and she seems completely unaware that she is in South Africa at all. at all. The Wood's family dog gets more lines than the black maid. As the family make their escape one the women I saw the film with - incidentally one of only about a dozen black people in a large, full cinema - whispered "This is like the sound of music." She had a point.Overall this is a film by a well-intentioned if somewhat inept white liberal about a radical black people's struggle. And really South Africa needs well-intentioned white liberals like it needs a hole in the head.