Dir. Anthony Fabian, UK/South Africa, 2008, 107 mins, English and some Zulu with subtitles
Cast:
Sophie Okonedo, Sam Neill, Alice Krige
Review by
Carol Allen
There are now young adults alive, who are too young to remember the system which shaped South Africa for nearly half a century. Under the apartheid laws, which were finally abolished in 1994, the races were legally segregated into separate racial groups (black, white, coloured, and Indian) with non whites deprived of most of their civil rights and subject to vastly inferior living conditions. Marriage between the different groups was also illegal.
Skin is based on the true life story of Sandra Laing, played as a teenager and adult by Okonedo and as a child by Ella Ramangwane. Sandra is born in the fifties to a white Afrikaner couple Abraham (Neill) and Sannie (Krige), who are shopkeepers in a remote area of the Eastern Transvaal. Unlike her two brothers, Sandra has coffee coloured skin and tightly curled black hair but she is their daughter and they regard her as white. When however they send her the same boarding school as their elder son, the authorities refuse to accept her, have her reclassified in a humiliating procedure as "coloured" and expel her. Her father fights the case through the courts to have her classification reversed, where the statement by a genetics expert that children like Sandra are a throwback due to the fact that "most Afrikaner carry black genes" causes a frisson of horror in the court room. The story hits the international headlines, the law is changed to make racial classification dependent on descent and parentage rather than appearance and Sandra is officially "white" again. But that's just the beginning of her story.
Being legally white is one thing, being accepted by white society is another. White boys perceive her as coloured and the boy she is attracted to is Petrus (Tony Kgoroge), a black man. When her father finds out, being a typical Afrikaner in his attitude he tries to separate them and when the now pregnant Sandra and Petrus elope to Swaziland, Abraham cuts all ties with her, refusing to allow his wife and sons to have any contact with her. Meanwhile Sandra, in danger of losing her children under the law, has to get herself reclassified as "coloured" and commit herself to a totally new way of life.
The way director Fabian tells Sandra's story is modest, low key and unhistrionic. Neill as the father torn between the beliefs of his upbringing and his love for his daughter, Krige as the mother fighting and failing to stay in touch with her child and Okenedo as Sandra all give good, well rounded performances. Sandra's new life with Petrus's family, living in a village of corrugated iron huts, which is lacking the basic facilities, even running water, of the society in which she has been raised, is arguably a bit prettified at times and it is a pity in some ways that the film chooses not to go into the political background, which brought about the abolition of apartheid, albeit too late for Sandra, one of many whose lives were ruined by the system. There is one particularly poignant sequence where the village is destroyed by the authorities and its inhabitants made refugees. The story may seem almost incomprehensible to those who have been raised in today's multi culturist society, but it happened within the lifetime of many of us and it should not be forgotten.
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