This is an eye opening drama based on a true story. This movie is available in the Pines
System. The movie is about Sandra Laing
who looks like a light skinned African American female, but is born to white
parents in Africa. Sandra is born during
a tough time in Apartheid Africa. Her
parents Abraham and Sannie raise her as a white girl, but when she is sent to a
boarding school at the age of 10 the teachers and students treat her like an
outcast. They say she doesn’t belong
because she is not white. Her parents
are white Afrikaans. They bring birth
certificates to the school to prove that she is white, because both her parents
are white. But the faculty can only look
at her coarse curly locks and darker skin and treat her bad.
Sandra is sent
to court to be examined by state officials and she is reclassified as
coloured. Abraham is livid and he fights
and fights to have his daughter reclassified.
This puts pressure on the whole family.
Sandra keeps looking at herself in the mirror and one day even paints
herself. Her mother assures her that she
is loved and accepted in the household.
At school her brother who is white and accepted finds it hard to let
anyone know that Sandra is his sister but he loves her dearly. The pressure is immense. The parents even go to the physician. The doctor thinks the mother may have this
condition called atavism where an ancestral genetic trait reappears. One of the partners may have black ancestors
and the trait came down through their daughter Sandra.
Once Sandra is
a teenager she starts to rebel because she doesn't feel that she fits in
anywhere. She starts to help out at her
father’s store. One day a black young
farmer comes into Sandra's father’s store and they start making eye
contact. The more he comes in she
eventually gets to know him, and she falls in love with him. Her father forbids it, and wants her to marry
someone white and respectable. Sandra
starts sneaking out with Petrus and one night her father finds out and he beats
her and locks her in. Heartbroken she
weeps for days. Her mother tries to
comfort her but to no avail. She
eventually sneaks out and elopes with Petrus to Swaziland. Enraged, her father sends the authorities to arrest them both for
illegal border trespassing. Once
released, her father gives her a stern choice: either come home or go with her
husband and say goodbye to them forever.
She decides to go with Petrus because she is pregnant with his
child. Sandra is not used to struggling
in a shack in South Africa working the fields and having no running water. The people accept her in that community so
she tries to adapt for the love of her husband.
As with any young mother, Sandra begins to miss her mother and her
mother wants her to see her grandchild.
Sandra sneaks back to her old home
and sees her mother in the grocery store.
They embrace and she hugs the baby.
When her father arrives, he tears them apart and forbids his wife not to
have anything to do with Sandra or the grandchild again. Abraham even turns her siblings away from
her. Sannie had another child when
Sandra was a younger teen and her father was worried about the same skin color
situation, and the child did come out darker.
He even questioned his own wife about having an affair with a black man
since she was so friendly to the locals.
She assured him of her fidelity.
Sandra has to live with being the
black sheep of the family, and even when her husband begins to abuse her she
finds her lonely with nowhere to go. She
eventually moves to another village and doesn’t see her parents for years. Once her father is older and on a sickbed he
asks his wife to reach out to their daughter.
Full of bitterness for all the years he kept them apart, she told him on
his sickbed a resounding “No.” Now you
want to make amends after all these years, we don’t deserve her
forgiveness.” It is amazing how Sandra
goes on to live her life with her beautiful kids and a reconnection with her
mother in the end. A must see!
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