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REVIEW

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‘Gripping,
tense film’
touches
reality of
apartheid
in South
Africa

Best Wishes for a
Peaceful New Year

: from

- Canada-USSR Friendship Society
Fraser Valley

Promoting education @¥

‘| Federation

and understanding.

of
Russian
Canadians

lakes this opportunity to wish our members and
Supporters greetings of the season.

Mav: 1988 bring vou good health, happiness and a
World fice of war and nuclear weapons.

: Season’ Ss Greetings

to all Tribune readers
peace activists
and supporters

Canadian Yugoslav
Community
Association

CRY FREEDOM. With Denzel Wash-
ington and Kevin Kline. Directed by
Richard Attenborough. At local thea-
tres.

On Sept. 12, 1977, Steven Biko, a
young South African civil rights leader,
was killed while in police custody. His
comatose, battered body was found
naked and shackled, face down on a
urine-soaked mattress on the floor of the
cell. The minister of police later “con-
fided” to a journalist that Biko had
somehow murdered himself by crushing
his own skull against the cell wall, just to
embarrass the government. The real cir-
cumstances of his death remain a mys-
tery to this day. Biko was 30 years old.

It was in reaction to this kind of news
blockade and sanitized censorship that
Richard Attenborough, who directed
Gandhi, undertook Cry Freedom — to
reveal to the world the horrors of that
criminal government, available only in
fragments through the inadequate inter-
national mass media. Attenborough
wanted to “ensure that having seen the
movie, nobody would be able to remain
indifferent to the situation in South
Africa.”

Cry Freedom, filmed in Zimbabwe
and Kenya, is based on the writings of
Donald Woods, a white South African
journalist who befriended Biko and was
later transformed from observer to acti-
vist by the Black leader’s example.
Woods, whose books still subject readers
in South Africa to arrest today, fled into
exile in London after being placed under
a five-year house arrest for alerting the
world to Biko’s government-authorized
murder. ;

The film fuses the harrowing story of
Woods’ flight to safety with his memo-
ries of the larger-than-life Biko (played
by St. Elsewhere star Denzel Washing-
ton) against the backdrop of the squalor
and terror of Black shantytown life in the
armed police state that is South Africa.
Here, poverty, homelessness, continuous
surveillance and police brutality are
shown as the everyday routine.

This tense, gripping drama fleshes out
the reality only glimpsed beneath the
daily front-page headlines. It reveals the
deeper layers of South African society,
where stark racial and class contrasts are
built upon foundations of a system based
on a coerced, cheap slave-labour force
which enables the disproportionately
prosperous white middle class to live like
royalty.

More than 20,000 attend the funeral of Steven Biko in a scene from Cry Freedom.

The film portrays Biko, a leader of the
Black Consciousness Movement, as bril-
liant, eloquent and visionary, towering
above the grim, dangerous reality, a bea-
con of hope. At Biko’s funeral proces-
sion, an entire enraged countryside
shows up and thousands more are
turned away by police.

Woods, as an ivory-tower armchair
journalist, at first denounces Biko and
the true, ugly face of South Africa after
visiting the Black townships.

His subsequent politicization and the
fate that gives him a taste of the daily
terror endured by Black people drives
home the message of how dangerously
close we all are to fascist oppression if we
tolerate it and allow it to grow.

The dramatic re-creation at the end of
the film of the massacre of nearly 700
young people at Soweto and the wound-
ing of thousands of others, along with
the final listing of the names of scores of

' people, including Biko, who “killed”

themselves in police custody — some as
recently as a few months ago — points
out to audiences the urgency of taking an
active role on behalf of South Africans.

Peter Jones, a Black South African
activist arrested with Biko and also tor-
tured, has expressed reservations about
Cry Freedom because it does not go into
more detail about the realities of incar-
ceration and torture. But he praised the
film because it “places Biko in the eyes of
many millions of people” and “has the
potential of influencing and affecting
people’s attitudes far beyond what nor-
mally would be achievable if people were
able to rely only on newspaper cover-

”

age.

A more serious shortcoming is the
film’s failure to present the central role of
the African National Congress, whose
work over the decades has brought
about a situation in which South Africa
is rapidly becoming ungovernable. It is
universally recognized that ANC leader
Nelson Mandela would be elected to
head the government of South Africa.

Kevin Kline, who plays Woods in the
film, has said he hopes Cry Freedom will
make an effective statement “to help fin-
ish Biko’s work.” He said: “This is not
only a movie about South Africa.
Racism, poverty and tyranny are univer-

sal themes ... the issues are burning. I'll
never forget the experience.”

— Prairie Miller

People’s Daily World

PACIFIC TRIBUNE, DECEMBER 16, 1987 e 27