Introduction!

“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

― Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

 

        Welcome to our blog where we will be exploring and critically analyzing the 1987 film "Cry Freedom" by Richard Attenborough. The film centers around the real life events involving white Richard Attenborough directed this dramatic story, based on actual events, about the friendship between two men struggling against apartheid in South Africa in the 1970's. Donald Woods (Kevin Kline) is a white liberal journalist in South Africa who begins to follow the activities of Stephen Biko (Denzel Washington), a courageous and outspoken black anti-apartheid activist. Woods and his wife Wendy (Penelope Wilton) get to know Biko, and they become friends, until Biko is brutally murdered at the hands of government troops in 1977 for his activities against the country's repression of the black majority population. Donald is shocked and appalled by Biko's murder and determined that the truth about Biko will become known to the world; eventually, Donald and Wendy Woods and their children must leave South Africa (and nearly everything they have) as they spread the word about Biko's life and death to ensure that he did not die in vain.

Very often, Hollywood and the media have been responsible for distorting the accuracy of historical events in order to rake in more money. A study has found that pupils retain the dodgy history in films shown in class as the as the truth, even if they have been taught the real version of events. The researchers from Washington University in St Louis described historical films as a "doubled-edged sword" in helping teachers bring the subject to life.

   

     NEW YORK TIMES : An article for the New York Times published in 1987, "Biko's terrible death in 1977, at age 30, at the hands of South Africa's Security Police (who at first tried to maintain that Biko had willfully starved to death or died of self-inflicted head wounds, until an inquest determined otherwise), was in some ways the most important event of his career, since it so outraged and galvanized many of his countrymen. Yet ''Cry Freedom'' makes relatively little of this, and in fact makes relatively little of Steve Biko himself, allowing him to disappear before the film is even half over. The rest of the time, it chooses to concentrate on Donald Woods, the newspaper editor who was Biko's close friend and bravely defied South African authorities on Biko's behalf. In theory, shifting the focus makes some sense, since the Biko story is sketchy and downbeat, the Woods part more conventionally dramatic. In fact, it is most unfortunate that this film, with its potential for focusing worldwide attention on the plight of black South Africans, should concentrate its energies on a white man. "

      LOS ANGELES TIMES: July 30, 1988 | SCOTT KRAFT, Times Staff Writer
Only hours after "Cry Freedom" won approval from government censors and made its South African premiere Friday, the authorities banned the anti-apartheid movie as a threat to public safety and seized film reels from at least 30 theaters nationwide. A multiracial crowd waiting for the 5 p.m. show outside a major downtown Johannesburg theater broke into shouts of " Amandla ! Amandla !"--"power" in Zulu--when the manager announced that the movie had been canceled by government order.

     LOS ANGELES TIMES : February 20, 1990 | SCOTT KRAFT, TIMES STAFF WRITER

Prints of the anti-apartheid film "Cry Freedom," seized by police from 30 South African theaters on its opening day in July, 1988, have been returned and the distributing company said Monday it will re-release the film April 27, nearly two years after its originally scheduled premiere. United International Pictures, the film's distributor here, said in a statement that it saw no remaining obstacles to the nationwide release of "Cry Freedom."

 January 29, 1989 | By Desmond Ryan, Inquirer Movie Critic
It is no coincidence that Mississippi Burning, Cry Freedom and A World Apart - the three most recent movies that have dramatized and denounced racism in this country and South Africa - come to a dead halt when they get to the funeral. In each of them, a blameless black man has lost his life to bigotry and hatred, and his martyrdom becomes the occasion for a demonstration of moral outrage and a vain hope for the ultimate triumph of tolerance and love. The camera moves away from the coffin and pans across a sea of tearful black faces.