In 2008 Anthony Fabian directed the film Skin, which is the story of a black girl named Sandra Laing (Sophie Okonedo). Sandra was born in 1955 to white Afrikaner parents during the Apartheid in South Africa. Skin is based on the book ”When She Was White: The True Story of a Family Divided by Race” of Judith Stone. The Apartheid was a system of racial segregation in South Africa from 1948 to 1991. During the 1950’s there were many new laws about the separation of white and colored people. Population Registration Act decided the definition of the race and registration of South Africans. The population was divided into white, black, colored and later Indian. Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act in 1949 forbade any kind of relationships between white and colored people. In the same year Group Areas Act defined different areas with races. In the movie the government gave a permission to destroy colored’s residential area to make it Afrikaner’s property. It made me feel so frustrated and sad. It’s wrong to define someone because the color of their skin, features of their face, social status, religion, background, gender or age. It isn’t right to mistreat people because the way they look. In the end we all bleed the same colour.
Skin is an extraordinary story about forgiveness, bitterness and survival. Sandra is normal young girl who doesn’t realize why she is so ordinary and why her skin color is different than her parents or big brother’s. She struggles to adapt in white people’s world despite she is legally white. It must have been confusing to young girl to understand the people’s prejudices and humiliating eyes. When she was a child, her father adored her, but when she grew up he get bitter and bitter. He wanted Sandra to date a white Afrikaner, but she fell in love with a local vegetable seller, a black man named Petrus Zwane. Sandra’s father, Abraham (Sam Neill), got really upset when he found out that his daughter is dating a Kaffer (the word is used in South Africa to refer to a black person). The anger is touchable. It felt sad and absurd that she wasn’t allowed to be with a man she loved.
Eventually Sandra escaped with Petrus and got pregnant. She lost her bond with her parents because Abraham was too selfish and bitter to admit that his daughter is happy with a black man. He decided not to remember Sandra as his child. From that day on, they didn’t see each other anymore. It took ten years from Abraham to regret what he had done. He didn’t get a chance to apologize because he died to a cancer, but I think that Sandra forgave her father in her heart. Skin was a brilliant movie about the meaning of the family and life. It doesn’t matter how many years you have been away from your family because those years won’t take your love away. Sandra got to see her mother, Sannie (Alice Krige), after 20 years apart. The scene was heart-warming. Sadness, suffering and longing were all gone. They had found each other again.
During the Apartheid white and colored had their own park benches, beaches and waiting rooms. A black person wasn’t allowed to sit or eat at same place where white people did. To Sandra Laing it was something else than just sitting in different chair or shopping in different stores than white. She was a survivor. She survived from a racial discrimination, fear and her husband’s abusing. Her story is here to remind us that we can cope with difficult situations and after all we can find happiness if we never give up.
Kanerva Kivistö 2B