Friends

In Johannesburg in the mid and late 1980s, three women, only a few years out of college, respond differently to the poverty, injustice, and violence upsetting the country. Sophie (Kerry Fox), the daughter of a white, middle-class, English-speaking family, works in a library and is a terrorist, estranged from her family, class, and husband; Aninka (Michele Burgers), the daughter of Boer farmers, is an archeologist; Thoko (Dambisa Kente), a black South African, teaches literature in a township. The three women share a house, even after Aninka marries and returns from her honeymoon with her husband. Sophie plants bombs in public institutions for an unnamed organization, first in a school, then at Johannesburg airport. The airport blast unexpectedly kills two people. Suspecting black militants, the police and white militias retaliate against black communities. Police raid the school at which Thoko teaches and whites attack and firebomb a township housing complex. Sophie's act, her fear, and her desperation, isolate her from her friends and drive her back to her alcoholic husband. She eventually meets with fellow terrorists and narrowly escapes a police raid that results in several deaths. She returns home and confesses her part in the bombings to Thoko and then to the authorities.

Besides Sophie's imprisonment, notoriety, and trial, the film focuses on Aninka and Thoko, who represent young, nonpolitical South Africans, white and black. Both women are shaken by Sophie's secret history and forced to face the country's worsening crisis. Thoko withdraws into depression, quits her teaching position, and spends her days in the township picking and selling fruit. Aninka visits Sophie in jail, argues with her husband about her responsibility to the country's future, and eventually, after hearing her father's white supremacist rhetoric at a picnic, seeks out Thoko. Sophie is suddenly released following a pardon of political prisoners enacted to ease racial tensions. She's met kindly by her parents (Anne Curteis and Ralph Draper), but when she asks about her friends, and if they'll drive her to Thoko's township, her mother slaps her. Sophie, committed to the destruction of racism and apartheid, leaves and rejoins her two friends.

First-time writer-director Elaine Proctor's film focuses on white South African confusion about what to do in a changing and violent society, reflecting the recent history of this country and, to some extent, justifying all the different positions and acts portrayed. Proctor's film remains optimistic, and there's never any doubt that the three women in this story will be reconciled. Their reunion at the township market dramatizes the necessity of understanding and commitment, just as their revolutionary power during chaotic and violent times demonstrates the way in which personal experience fuels political consciousness. Proctor's dramatization of racial problems through iconoclastic use of familiar stereotypes is comparable to the polemical work of Spike Lee, though Proctor's work is less bombastic and provocative. (Violence, nudity, sexual and adult situations.) leave a comment