Helena Baard | Afrikaans Film in Flux: Investigating the Deconstruction of Apartheid Ideology in Contemporary Afrikaans Films

How do contemporary Afrikaans films, rooted in biographical and historic source material, interrogate apartheid ideology to deconstruct the cultural hegemony of traditional Afrikaner culture and its reproduction within contemporary Afrikaner culture?

I do a film analysis of six recent Afrikaans films made in South Africa, namely Vir die Voëls (2016), Ellen: The Ellen Pakkies Story (2018), Kanarie (2018), Moffie (2019) Poppie Nongena (2019), and Toorbos (2021). The history of South African cinema is closely tied to the country’s socio-political past. South Africa was an apartheid state from 1948 till 1994, which meant that it had legalised racial segregation. At that time, it was a fascist, authoritarian state and film, specifically Afrikaans film, was used to reproduce the state’s apartheid ideology. This meant that film was highly controlled and limited in content. After 1994 the South African film industry collapsed as the country started to navigate its newfound democracy. Many of the societal issues caused by apartheid, however, remained unchanged and ignored by the now disenfranchised Afrikaner people. An emerging tendency in Afrikaans film, engages more critically with these issues. The films under analysis in my study engage with queer identity, gender inequality, racism and persisting structural inequality. These films question aspects of hegemonic Afrikaner culture that is still being perpetuated today and the apartheid ideology that underpins it.