‘Cry Freedom’ Viewed as a History Lesson : S. African Critics Oppose Government Suppression of Movie

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — The film “Cry Freedom” had as many as three screenings in some theaters last week before it was banned, and those South Africans who managed to see it have been praising it as an important history lesson for their country.

“The government is making a very big mistake trying to keep people away from ideas, from events and from history,” said Chris More, a black magazine editor who saw the film Friday morning. “These things happened, and it’s important for both black and white South Africans to be able to look back on events and reassess the future.”

The film, a Universal Pictures production, portrays the friendship between Steve Biko, the leader of the black-consciousness movement who died in police custody 11 years ago, and Donald Woods, the liberal white editor of a newspaper in the coastal city of East London. It was directed by Richard Attenborough.

Sad Chapter of History

While ardent supporters of the government found fault with the movie, many said they thought the story of Biko was a sad chapter in South Africa’s past that should not be hidden from the people.

A large pro-government newspaper, Beeld, which is printed in Afrikaans, the language spoken by the majority of white South Africans, sent three reporters to an advance screening of the movie last week, and each concluded that it was a movie their readers should see.

“Where distortions of fact appear, surely this is the time to debate them,” said Schalk Schoombie, one of the reporters. “Every South African and Afrikaans-speaking person ought to decide for themselves whether Attenborough, Woods and the whole world have sucked a story out of their thumb.”

Willem Pretorius, another Beeld reporter, said, “Perhaps you can say it is propaganda, and that the good guys are too good and the bad guys are too bad.” But the part that is true, he said, “is something you cannot close your eyes to. This is perhaps the greatest reason that people ought to see the movie.”

“Cry Freedom” opened Friday morning with the approval of the government’s censors, but before the evening shows began, it was banned and the film confiscated, with thousands of people still holding tickets for weekend shows.

Kobus van Rooyen, chairman of the censor board that unanimously approved the film’s showing, had said that the film, although “second rate,” posed no threat to society. Van Rooyen’s life was threatened over the weekend and his house was placed under guard, police said.

In overruling its own censors, leaders of the white minority-led government said the movie constitutes a threat to public safety and security and could trigger violence among the black majority.

A government spokesman said the film was filled with “crude propaganda” because it depicts radical blacks as good and whites, particularly the police and government, as bad and callous. Biko’s rejection of whites and advocacy of violence, the government said, were “underplayed or not depicted at all.”

Critics Praise Film

South Africa’s film critics, white and black, were kind to the film, even kinder than many American critics have been.

Reviewers here were generally impressed with the movie’s power to elicit emotions from viewers, but some faulted it for, among other things, being too simplistic in its view of those violent days a decade ago and ignoring the complexities of black politics, in which Biko’s movement played only a part.

“It is beyond comprehension how until now we could have heard so much about this film’s minor inaccuracies and the weakness of the second half and so little about how good it is,” wrote Rina Minervini in the Star, the country’s largest-circulation daily. “It’s deeply moving and frequently brilliant.”

Brian Pottinger, in the moderate Sunday Times, criticized “Cry Freedom” for what he called its “lineal, Hitler-versus-the-Cosby-family simplicity.”

In another review for the Star, Peter Feldman said: “It has been cunningly created and lovingly fashioned to transmit images that will distress, enrage and upset. It leaves nobody unmoved--whatever their political viewpoint. ‘Cry Freedom’ must certainly be viewed. But if one has to ignore the politics that governed its making and judge it purely on its merits as a film, I found it unworthy of its lofty pretensions.”

Many reviewers criticized the film for focusing on the political transformation of a white liberal, Woods, and the critics thought this was much less riveting and significant than the story of Biko and what he represented.

However, most of the critics applauded the performances of Denzel Washington, as Biko, and Kevin Kline, as Woods.

“You would never guess that either of the actors was American,” Minervini wrote in the Star. “Top marks to their accent coaches.” She added, though, that many of the Afrikaans accents in the film had “a comic-opera tinge.”

The government’s handling of the release of “Cry Freedom” was criticized widely on the editorial pages of newspapers. The Sunday Times, in a lead editorial, contended that the government “is not afraid of exposing us to the evident propaganda of the film but of confronting us with its considerable truth.”

‘A Crude Effort’

“To avoid that,” it added, “it bypasses its own censorship machine, mounts a crude disinformation effort and gives a failing film an unimaginable boost in foreign markets. It acts, in short, exactly as Attenborough hoped it would.”

The City Press, a black newspaper in Johannesburg, said in an editorial that the government’s handling of the whole affair “was clumsy, insensitive and downright stupid.”

Stoffel van der Merwe, the minister of information, said the government had hoped that its censor board “would do its job” and ban the film. When it did not, he said, the government had no choice but to act, even if it made the country look bad to the outside world.

“We had to choose the lesser of two evils,” Van der Merwe said.