Skin

What it's about:

Ten year-old Sandra (Ella Ramangwane) is a conspicuously African looking girl from a remote area in the Eastern Transvaal. Her parents, are Abraham (Sam Neill) and Sannie Laing (Alice Krige) - white Afrikaner shopkeepers. Despite her mixed-race appearance, Sandra’s lovingly brought up as a ‘white’ little girl until she is sent to boarding school, were her looks do not sit well with teachers and parents, and the Afrikaans community at large. At 17, Sandra (Sophie Okonedo) realises that she is never going to be accepted by the white community. She  feels more at ease around black people, and thus falls in love with Petrus  Zwane (Tony Kgoroge) — a black, local vegetable vendor, and begins an illicit love affair which tears her family apart.

What we thought:

On first glance of this movie, I vividly recalled when Okonedo received an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress for her breathtaking portrayal of the wife of a Rwandan hotel manager played by Don Cheadle in the genocide flick Hotel Rwanda. I also recalled when she was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actress for her role in a movie about a disaster of another kind, Tsunami – The Aftermath.

"Why?" you ask. Well, I recall those two roles because this performance is not that different, therefore not giving us much insight into her flexibility as an actress, but nevertheless, affirming her as one of the best actresses at depicting characters going through hardship and suffering.

Believe it or not, at 41 years of age, Okonedo is able to inhabit Sandra as a 17-year old through to her 50s. She is a unique character, a young woman who is faced with the conundrum of being a white girl trapped in black skin, and is thus shunned by the white community in which she resides. The pain - both physical and emotional - is dramatically portrayed by Okonedo who herself comes from a mixed-race family (Nigerian father and Jewish mother). This certainly must be a very personal role for her.

Even so, at certain points as the tape continues to roll, she struggles to maintain a South African accent, and her British vernacular is clearly exposed more often than not. That doesn’t do justice to a movie that centres on a South African character. Her breathtakingly convincing performance, however, overrides the “accent” issue and more than makes up for that.

New Zealand actor Sam Neill, who plays Sandra’s father Abraham, pulls off a spell-binding and emotionally raw performance that demonstrates that old adage "blood is thicker than water". Being a firm, Afrikaner who evidently upheld apartheid, he nonetheless loved his daughter, and this tension comes alive in the film. SA’s very own Tony Kgoroge plays Petrus, Sandra’s forbidden lover. A classic Romeo and Juliet  tale ensues, but this one has a rather different twist – with Romeo, turning into a drunk and abusive husband when the going got tough.
 
It’s also worth mentioning that young Ella Ramangwane (who plays Sandra at 10), though new to the big time,  delivers a strong performance which points to a bright future with the right training.

The heartbreaking tale journeys from the apartheid 50s through the years leading up to SA’s change to a democratic nation in the early 90s. We are given an in-depth outline of the discomforting truth about where we were as a nation then, and this depiction is made all the more poignant by the startling fact that it is based on a true story – that of Sandra Laing who was born in an apartheid stricken Piet Retief in 1955. I bet you are asking yourself why such a clearly significant story of a born in such controversial circumstances is news to you?. Why is the release of this film the first time many South Africans will learn of her plight? (There is however a book called When She Was White: The True Story of A Family Divided By Race by Judith Stone)

Skin is an emotional rollercoaster, depicting a family painfully separated by colour. It’s a story about forgiveness, but most importantly, one about the triumph of the human spirit.