Sarafina! (film)

Last updated

Sarafina!
Sarafina poster.jpg
Theatrical release poster
Directed by Darrell James Roodt
Screenplay by
Based on
Sarafina!
by
Produced by Anant Singh
Starring
CinematographyMark Vicente
Edited by
  • Peter Hollywood
  • Sarah Thomas
Music by
  • Mbongeni Ngema (songs)
  • Hugh Masekela (songs)
  • Stanley Myers (score)
Production
companies
Distributed by
Release dates
  • 11 May 1992 (1992-05-11)(Cannes)
  • 18 September 1992 (1992-09-18)(US)
  • 9 October 1992 (1992-10-09)(South Africa)
  • 15 January 1993 (1993-01-15)(UK)
  • 3 March 1993 (1993-03-03)(France)
Running time
98 minutes
CountriesUnited States
South Africa
United Kingdom
France
LanguageEnglish
Box office$8.6 million (South Africa/US)

Sarafina! is a 1992 musical drama film based on Mbongeni Ngema's 1987 musical of the same name. The film was directed by Darrell Roodt and written by Ngema Mbongeni and William Nicholson, and stars Leleti Khumalo, Miriam Makeba, John Kani, Ngema, and Whoopi Goldberg; Khumalo reprises her role from the stage performance.

Contents

An international co-production of South Africa, the United States, France, and the United Kingdom, the film premiered on 11 May 1992, at the Cannes Film Festival.

Summary

The story focuses on students involved in the Soweto Uprising, in opposition to the implementation of Afrikaans as the language of instruction in schools.

The character Sarafina feels shame at her mother's acceptance of her role as domestic servant in a white household in apartheid South Africa, and inspires her peers to rise up in protest, especially after her inspirational teacher, Mary Masombuka is imprisoned. In the opening scene, Sarafina is seen talking while staring at Nelson Mandela's picture, at the time the South African icon was still imprisoned. In a later scene Sarafina is again talking while staring at Mandela's picture on the wall, criticizing him for being gone for a long time and not responding to the nation's pleas, idolising him as someone who can change the horrific situation that South Africa is in.

Plot

Sarafina is a teenaged school student who idolizes Nelson Mandela, who is currently serving life imprisonment for conspiracy and treason against the apartheid South African government. A school play is coming soon, and Sarafina wishes to play Mandela.

At school, a weary school principal assigns a history teacher named Mary Mason Buco to lead prayer songs to prevent any more riots. Meanwhile, the South African Police tries to convince the principal that the students are responsible for leading the riots due to a number of schools burning to the ground, but the principal does not believe them. During lunch break, the school staff discusses with the police who is really behind this chain of incidents, with Mary speculating it was the fault of juvenile delinquency causing it (which the students are covering up to avoid getting themselves in trouble with the faculty).

During rehearsal for the school play, Sarafina gets an idea of its happy ending, in which Mandela is set free to lead people to a new South Africa. After school in the meantime, Sarafina's boyfriend Crocodile leads a gang of students to stop the heavy taxing decreed by the government but are forced to flee when the authorities arrive to start a police riot.

At a white residence where her mother works, Sarafina expresses her boredom with the authorized syllabus the officials required for the adults to teach their children, wishing instead to be free, which is something her activist father always wanted before he died a hero. Her mother, however, is often annoyed by her daughter's daydreaming, believing that dawdling is contrary to their way of life in the apartheid. Meanwhile, an injured Crocodile is forced to retreat to Sarafina's house for treatment after being subjected to police brutality.

At Mary's house, Mary explains to Sarafina that her husband Joe rarely used his gun to defend their home if necessary.

The next day, Mary denies teaching children communism to the police while Sarafina and Crocodile shame their classmate Guitar for selling them out by telling his suspicion to Constable Sabela on them, forcing him to admit this is what officials truly want in exchange for his father's life as a spy to the government: to brutally discipline the weak with cruel and unusual punishments. Sadly, once word got out from Guitar, it isn't long before Mary is sent to prison under the suspicion of conspiracy against the apartheid in favor of a new teacher, who then proceeds to fictionalize the French invasion of Russia according to the authorized syllabus. This disgusts the students over how a new teacher would see Napoleon as a coward for allowing to people of Moscow to commit arson on their own town (which the new teacher forbids the students from doing) in order to divert him rather than just a historical figure, so they angrily expel him from the classroom. The police take notice of the new teacher's expulsion from the classroom, so they start firing warning shots to try and scatter the students into submission. Some students, including Crocodile, fall dead at the police's hands in the process.

At Crocodile's and the other fallen students' funeral, a priest warns of the same price everyone else will pay for their arrogant presumption of being the native and rightful population of the very country that is South Africa, in which they all agree to risk their lives fighting for the sake of freedom. With those words of advice from the priest, protests against the apartheid finally commence, but they escalate into a race riot (where Sabela is burned alive one night after throwing Guitar out of his car when he finds no use for him anymore) after the police turn them away, and then an armed rebellion, in which the students build large barricades out of old furniture to protect their homeland from the incoming South African Defence Force. However, this armed rebellion ends when the SADF destroys the barricades with tanks and jets and then captures all the students who are still alive.

During Sarafina's interrogation, a prison warden reveals that the police killed Mary on the spot to keep her quiet and will do the same for her the next time she doesn't follow the authorized syllabus. With approval of the warden, a series of physical and psychological torture on Sarafina and other demonstrators ultimately commences to try and brainwash them into following the authorized syllabus in exchange for their release from prison. For the final phase of her torture, Sarafina is subjected to face her worst fear: rats. The other prisoners are forced to watch as Sarafina is locked in a large cage filled with rats, with prison guards hoping the rats will feed on Sarafina's flesh for her part in the revolt. This makes Sarafina so terrified that she begs the guards to feed her classmates to the rats and not her, causing the guards to release Sarafina from prison immediately after hearing her beg for mercy.

After Sarafina is sent home, her mother finally apologizes to her for an unintentionally hurtful remark, promising to support her dream of freedom in any way she can. After a discussion about the venue for the school play with Guitar, Sarafina leads the cast of students as Mandela. This school play becomes such as smashing success that Mandela is then released from prison by the year 1990 and becomes the first President of South Africa four years later, bringing the country back to normal as it was before the apartheid.

Cast

Production

Filming

Producer Anant Singh acquired the film rights to the Broadway musical Sarafina! After no Hollywood studio was willing to finance it, Singh raised the funds himself, with the BBC and the French company Revcom being among the investors. By the time filming started, Nelson Mandela was freed and apartheid was abolished, though racial tensions were still high. Said director Darrell Roodt: “Though our project is still confrontational and angry, it’s told with more hope and a spirit of reconciliation.” At the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, Whoopi Goldberg was announced to play Mary Masombuka; she was reportedly the first Black American actress to film a project in South Africa. [3]

The film was shot on location at Morris Isaacson High School in Soweto, South Africa. Morris Isaacson was a centre of the 1976 Soweto student uprisings. [4] Many of the extras and some of the cast members participated in the real-life resistance in Soweto, while Miriam Makeba was a political exile. Singh told the press that the film would be a different tackling of apartheid than other films about the subject, where they were told from a white perspective. "When people ask me why there is no good white in the movie," said Singh, "I tell them that this is one movie that isn’t about whites. Many of the actors have been arrested, had the police break down their doors in the middle of the night. Almost everyone had either first or second-hand experience with the movement. The kids in the cast were performing what they lived.” Given the racism that was still prevalent in South Africa post-apartheid, there were concerns that the filming of scenes showing protests and rioting would fan the flames. To avert this, the prop military vehicles were emblazoned with the insignia "Sarafina!" to ensure the public that a movie was being filmed there. [3]

In the United States, the film had some of the more graphic scenes removed to avoid a more restrictive rating. [3] The MPAA rated the film PG-13 for "scenes of apartheid-driven violence;" the Director's Cut, which was released on LaserDisc in 1993, was rated R for "strong scenes of violence." [5]

Reception

Accolades

The film was screened out of competition at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival, where it was greeted with a standing ovation. [6] [3] Years later, Whoopi Goldberg mentioned on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah (who said the film was a hit in South Africa), that the ‘92 LA rebellion happened at the same time that Sarafina! was released which hampered the film's chance of success in the United States. [7] The film holds a 60% score on Rotten Tomatoes. [8]

Release

Miramax Films acquired the domestic rights to Sarafina! in February 1992 after seeing 40 minutes of footage; in turn, Miramax Films licensed those rights to Disney (with its subsidiary, Hollywood Pictures) after the film was screened at Cannes. [3] The film was released on 18 September 1992. Sarafina! was re-released in South Africa on 16 June 2006 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Soweto uprising in Soweto. The re-mastered director's cut is not very different from the original, except for the inclusion of one scene that was cut from the original, between Leleti Khumalo (Sarafina) and Miriam Makeba (Sarafina's mother), which includes a musical number "Thank You Mama".

Box office

Sarafina! grossed $7,306,242 in the United States and Canada. [9] It was the fourth-highest-grossing film in South Africa for the year with a gross of $1.33 million. [10]

Notes

  1. ↑ Since the acquisition of Miramax by ViacomCBS (now known as Paramount Global) on April 3, 2020, Paramount Pictures owns the US rights to the film.

References

  1. ↑ "Sarafina! (1992)". AFI Catalog of Feature Films . Retrieved 14 October 2021.
  2. ↑ "Sarafina! (1992)". Swedish Film Database . Retrieved 14 October 2021.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 "MOVIES : 'Sarafina!' in a Brave New World : Five years ago, the anti-apartheid musical appealed to the emotions; now comes the film, which also taps into the mind". Los Angeles Times. 13 September 1992. Retrieved 16 September 2021.
  4. ↑ Glaser, Clive (2 January 2020). "Beyond the legacy of 1976: Morris Isaacson High School, popular memory and the struggle for education in central Soweto" . African Studies. 79 (1): 21–36. doi:10.1080/00020184.2020.1721266. ISSN   0002-0184. S2CID   214194976.
  5. ↑ "Search". www.filmratings.com. Retrieved 16 September 2021.
  6. ↑ "Festival de Cannes: Sarafina". Festival-cannes.com. Retrieved 9 September 2017.
  7. ↑ "The Lullaby review". Cinema76. Retrieved 16 September 2021.
  8. ↑ Sarafina! (1992) , retrieved 4 March 2020
  9. ↑ Sarafina! at Box Office Mojo
  10. ↑ "South African top 10 1992". Screen International . 29 January 1993. p. 27.