SSH401 – FILM STUDY: Skin
The year is 1965, and 10-year-old Sandra and her parents, A
aham and Sannie, are white
Afrikaners. Her parents are shopkeepers in a remote area of the Eastern Transvaal and,
despite Sandra's mixed-race appearance, have lovingly
ought her up as their white little girl.
Sandra is sent to a boarding school in the neighbouring town of Piet Retief, where her (white)
other Leon is also studying, but parents of other students and teachers complain that she
does not belong.
She is examined by State officials, reclassified as coloured, and expelled from the school.
Sandra's parents are shocked, but A
aham fights through the courts to have the classification
eversed. The story becomes an international scandal and media pressure forces the law to
change, so that Sandra is classified as officially white again.
By the time she is 17, Sandra realizes she is never going to be accepted by the white
community. She falls in love with Petrus, a young black man and the local vegetable seller,
and begins an illicit love affair. A
aham threatens to shoot Petrus and disown Sandra. Sannie
is torn between her husband's rage and her daughter's predicament. Sandra elopes with
Petrus to Swaziland. A
aham alerts the police, and has them a
ested and put in prison for
the illegal border crossing. Sandra is released by the local magistrate to return home with her
parents, but she decides to return to Petrus, as she is pregnant with his child. Her father
disowns her.
Now Sandra must live her life as a coloured woman in South Africa for the first time, restricted
to housing with no running water and no sanitation, and struggling on little income. Although
she feels more at home in this community, she desperately misses her parents and yearns for
a reunion. She and her mother make attempts to communicate, but are consistently thwarted
y Sandra's father. Late in his life, when he is too sick to act on his own, he reconsiders and
asks his wife to take him to visit Sandra. Sandra's mother, angry that his new-found guilt had
surfaced only after he had for 10 years stu
ornly ignored her own emotional torment and
longing for a reunion, refuses his request and says that neither of them deserves Sandra's
forgiveness.
Eventually, Sandra's ma
iage to Petrus deteriorates and he becomes physically abusive. She
leaves him, taking their two children with her. She looks for her parents but finds they had
since moved from her childhood home. Not knowing where they are, she continues with her
life, raising her children by herself.
https:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikane
https:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Transvaal
https:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_Retief,_Mpumalanga
https:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swaziland
When the county's apartheid government comes to an end, there is renewed interest in her
story by the media. Sandra's mother sees Sandra interviewed on television and writes to her
to tell her of her father's death two years earlier. The letter provides no return address nor
any other clue as to Sannie's whereabouts, but receiving it prompts Sandra to renew her
search. Eventually, she finds her mother living in a nursing home and the two are happily
eunited.
An epilogue tells that Sandra's mother died in 2001, and her two
others continue to refuse
to see her or her family.
https:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid