Skin (2008)

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Skin Movie Poster

Skin is a British-South African biography-drama movie about Sandra Laing. Directed by Anthony Fabian this 107 minutes movie tells about her life as a child who has white parents but doesnt she doesnt look like her parents. This movie released on 24 July 2008 (United Kingdom) who starring

  • Sophie Okonedo as Sandra Laing
  • Sam Neill as Abraham Laing
  • Alice Krige as Sannie Laing
  • Hannes Brummer as Leon Laing

Plot

Ten-year-old Sandra has an uniquely African look. Her parents, Abraham and Sannie, were white Afrikaners, unaware of their black ancestry. They are shop owners in the remote area of Eastern Transvaal, and despite the mixed-race appearance of Sandras, they kindly brought her up as their white little girl. Sandra is sent to boarding school in the nearby town of Piet Retief, where her (white) brother Leon is also studying, but the parents and teachers complain that she does not belong. It is examined by State officials, reclassified as Colored, and expelled from school. Sandra's parents are shocked, but Abraham fights through the courts to reverse the classification.The story becomes an international scandal and media pressure forces the law to change, so that Sandra becomes officially White again.

By the time she was 17, Sandra realized that she would never be accepted by the white community. She falls in love with Petrus, a black man, a local vegetable vendor, and begins an illicit love affair. Abraham is threatening to shoot Petrus and disown Sandra. Sannie is torn between her anger of husbands and her troubled daughters. Sandra elopes with Petrus to Swaziland. Abraham alerts the police, arrests them, and puts them in jail. Sandra has been told by the local magistrate to go home, but she refuses.

Now Sandra must live her life, for the first time, as a black woman in South Africa  with no running water, no sanitation, and little income. She and Petrus have two children, and although she feels more at home in this community, she desperately misses her parents and yearns for a reunion.[1]

Black Racism

Sandra and her white parents

The movie depicts how in apartheid-era South Africa, where race meant everything. She doesnt get justice and classified “colored” even though her parents were white.[2] There is a scene when she was 10 and dragged out of school by the police because the principal had decided she wasn’t white. The government agreed and relabeled her “colored.” It's so tragic that the body became a kind of tablet on which discriminatory laws were written. Her skin, her nose, her lips were all under examination. "A man sticks a pencil into the young Sandra’s short hair, a re-creation of the “pencil test” used by some government boards to judge race. If the pencil stayed in, the person was deemed black."[3] This movie also potrays that you could be involved in committing crimes by dealing with black people. "Since she is officially consider white it is a crime under apartheid for her to live with a black man".[4]


Reference

  1. Synopsis. Imdb. Retrieved January 20, 2021
  2. Janet Guttsman. Movie shows apartheid's cruelty and contradictions. Reuters. SEPTEMBER 12, 2008. Retrieved Janury 20, 2021
  3. Manohla Dargis. White to Colored and Back Again in Apartheid’s Maze. Nytimes. Oktober 29, 2009. Retrieved January 20, 2021
  4. Roger Ebert. Cry, the beloved daughter: the black child of white parents. Rogerebert. November 11, 2009. Retrieved January 20, 2021