Boetie Gaan Border Toe

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Boetie Gaan Border Toe
Directed by Regardt van den Bergh
Written byJohan Coetzee, Cor Nortjé
Produced byPhilo Pieterse
Starring Arnold Vosloo
Eric Nobbs

Frank Dankert
Release date
  • 1984 (1984)
Running time
94 minutes
CountrySouth Africa
LanguageAfrikaans

Boetie Gaan Border Toe is a 1984 satire film set during the South African Border War. The film was directed by Regardt van den Bergh, and stars Arnold Vosloo, Frank Dankert and Frank Opperman. Production was assisted by the South African Defence Force (SADF). [1]

Contents

Plot

Boetie van Tonder, a young Afrikaner, faces conscription into the South African military. Although initially determined to resist national service and defy instruction, he quickly finds comfort in the company of his fellow conscripts as they weather the harshness of basic training and their subsequent deployment to the Angolan border. [2]

Cast

Reception

Literary analyst Monica Popescu described Boetie Gaan Border Toe and its sequel, Boetie Op Manoeuvres, as works which essentially romanticised the South African Border War and devoted a disproportionate amount of emphasis to the "chivalrous conduct of SADF soldiers". [3] Keyan Tomaselli of the University of Johannesburg criticised the film as "propagandistic". [2]

Boetie Gaan Border Toe was a financial success, breaking South African box office records. [4]

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References

  1. Raoul Granqvist (1993). Major Minorities: English Literatures in Transit (1993 ed.). Rodopi Publishers. pp. 89–92. ISBN   90-5183-559-0.
  2. 1 2 Tomaselli, Keyan (2013). The Cinema of Apartheid Race and Class in South African Film. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. p. 194. ISBN   9781317928393 . Retrieved 22 September 2017.
  3. Popescu, Monica (2010). South African Literature Beyond the Cold War. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 49. ISBN   9781137071859.
  4. Botha, Martin (2012). South African cinema: 1896-2010. Bristol: Intellect. ISBN   9781841504582.