Release Year: 2005 Rating: R Duration: 104 minutes Other Title: Country of My Skull Director: John Boorman Producer: John Boorman, Robert Chartoff, Kieran Corrigan Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
synopsis
Langston Whitfield (Samuel L. Jackson) is a Washington Post journalist. His editor provocatively sends him to South Africa to cover the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, in which the perpetrators of murder and torture on both sides during Apartheid are invited to come forward and confront their victims. By telling the unvarnished truth and expressing contrition, they may be granted amnesty. Can the deep wounds of Apartheid be healed through reconciliation? Langston is deeply skeptical. He tracks down Col. De Jager, the most notorious torturer in the SA Police and tries to penetrate the mind of a monster, an experience that obliges him to confront his own demons. Anna Malan (Juliette Binoche), is an Afrikaans poet who is covering the hearings for radio. As a white South African she is shattered by the accounts of the cruelty and depravity committed by her fellow countrymen. Anna and Langston must both question their sense of identity. Where do they each belong? How responsible are they for what is done in the name of their respective countries? The moving testimony of the victims affects them deeply. In different ways they are both estranged from their families, and their shared experience draws them ever closer to each other. It is a story charting the unfathomable depths of human cruelty and the redeeming power of forgiveness and love.
cast
Samuel L. Jackson as Langston Whitfield
quote
Anna Malan: Because of you this land no longer lies between us but within. It breathes becalmed, after being wounded in it's wonderous throat. In the country of my skulll it sings. Five thousand stories are scorched on your skin... I am changed forever... Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me...
When a reporter for the Washington Post, Langston Whitfield (Samuel L. Jackson) finds out that the story he sent to his editor was buried on page seven, he went ballistic. "The subject is too remote," was the word back in our nation's capital. Too remote? Perhaps geographically, yes. Whitfield is covering a set of judicial hearings in South Afirca in 1996 when as TRC, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission," hears testimony from blacks who were harassed, tortured and sometimes killed by the then white government that ruled the country under the now defunct system of apartheid. There are ample events in history to lend universality to this movie's theme, though a youthful audience might consider the Nuremberg trials in Germany in1946 in which Nazi perpetrators of heinous act were judged by an allied commission to be ancient history. But how about the torture to which American troops subject Arab prisoners in Abu Gharib, humiliations that included a naked American woman's smearing fake blood all over the face of one of those being held as a suspect in terrorism? Ultimately "In My Country" resonates far beyond geographical borders and time periods, though under director John Boorman's watchful eye, photographer Seamus Deasy anchors the production in the specific locale of beautiful South Africa, particularly in and about the cosmopolitan city of Capetown.
