South Africa, 1985. President P.W. Botha’s segregationist regime is internationally isolated and on the brink of collapse. Terrorist attacks by the African National Congress proliferate while Nelson Mandela, in the final days of his 27-year prison term, is a global hero. Playing a very risky game, Michael Young, an employee of the British mining company Consolidated Goldfields, organises a series of secret meetings in the UK between the Afrikaner establishment and the outlawed, terrorist ANC. All the while, Botha’s operative are exploiting Young’s diplomacy to further their overall scheme of seducing Mandela and dividing and conquering the reform movement...
The crucial role of British business interests in averting looming chaos and ensuring that the collapse of apartheid was achieved without massive further bloodshed, gives this deftly dramatized slice of recent history unexpected edge. Interweaving events in South Africa with meetings in the UK, director Pete Travis (Omagh, Vantage Point) coolly racks up the tension, focusing on Thabo Mbeki (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the ANC leader who later became the country’s president, and Professor Willie Esterhuyse (William Hurt), an Afrikaner lecturer in philosophy presented with momentous, extremely dangerous choices.
“The furtive talks between the imprisoned Nelson Mandela (Clarke Peters) and President P.W. Botha’s wily head of intelligence Dr Neil Barnard (Mark Strong) are well known. But other than readers of Robert Harvey’s book, The Fall of Apartheid, on which is the film is based, few know about a dozen talks in an English country manor that paralleled the Mandela discussions...
This is a hypnotically gripping account of [those] secret talks... Writer Paula Milne meticulously selects the vital personalities and scenes... Director Pete Travis then stages these scenes as if this were a political thriller, underscoring the dangers – no exaggeration there – to those involved and a vivid sense of time running out before blood runs everywhere... The film is not so much a history lesson... but a thrilling primer on how to end conflicts of blood hatred.” — Kirk Honeycutt, Hollywood Reporter
