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