OPINION | CRITICAL MASS: Best films since March cover multitude of humanity arkansasonline.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from arkansasonline.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Starring Kai Luke Brümmer, Dylan Stassen, Matthew Vey, Stefan Vermaak
Published Jun 02, 2021
8
Born in South Africa under apartheid, director Oliver Hermanus never gave much thought to the hardships of white South Africans. In his mind, he says in the film s press notes, all white people in South Africa have had it easy. This is true but imagine being a gay teenage boy in South Africa in the 1980s. They, too, saw prejudice as they lived a life of illegality.
The film s title,
Moffie, is a derogatory and oppressive Afrikaans term for gay. Many lives were ruined and changed due to apartheid and this included every white boy over the age of 16, who became the property of the state and was forced to complete two years of compulsory military service to defend a white supremacist regime against communism in bordering Angola. This, Hermanus says, forcibly imprinted upon nearly one million white boys a diseased ideology of white supremacy, racial intolerance and the desire to
Better Tagline: I am in a world of shit.
Not So Brief Plot Synopsis: In the early 1980s, all South African males age 16-60 were conscripted into the South African Defence Force to defend their country s apartheid regime against Soviet-backed Angola. One new recruit, Nicholas van der Swart (Kai Luke Brummer), has to contend not only with the brutal training, but hiding the fact he s gay (derogatorily referred to as a moffie in Afrikaans) from both military command and his brothers-in-arms. Critical Analysis: There s an adage that says the best time in history to live as a woman (or person of color, or LGBTQ) is right now. The next best time is tomorrow. Those fond of pining for the good old days tend not to fall into those categories, for reasons that should be obvious.