political drama directed
by : Bille August featuring
: Joseph Fiennes - Dennis Haysbert - Diane Kruger - Faith Ndukwana - Terry
Pheto running
time : 1 hour 58 minutes
Bille August's inspirational
docudrama Goodbye Bafana begins in 1968, with South Africa buried neck-deep
in the horrors of apartheid and Nelson Mandela (Dennis Haysbert) - then
an underground leader of the African National Congress - imprisoned on
Robben Island for sedition. As the story opens, the native African population
of the country - 25,000,000 in number - buckles beneath the crippling weight
of the racist white minority, who control the Nationalist Party Government.
The film follows the spiritual and psychological journey of James Gregory
(Joseph Fiennes), a Caucasian Afrikaner who came of age on a farm in the
Transkei and initially views all blacks as subhuman. Gregory also speaks
Mandela's native language of Xhosa with perfect fluency, which makes him
an ideal candidate to serve as warden of the Robben Island Prison and eavesdrop
on Mandela and his inmates. What he fails to anticipate is the most unlikely
and special of friendships (one of history's greatest) that burgeons between
himself and Mandela - and helps him evolve from a narrow-minded bigot with
limited self-awareness to a sensitive, humane critic of social injustice
with a heightened awareness of mankind's ill treatment of one another and
a genuine level of love for his fellow man. As the friendship between Gregory
and Mandela grows and matures, it symbolizes Africa's transition from the
oppressiveness of Apartheid to the freedom of multi-racial democracy.
