Filmed over 9 years, I, AFRIKANER is a challenging and intimate portrait of a filmmaker’s white South African family trapped in an unsolvable rural conflict.
I Afrikaner, An intimate portrait of South Africa after the apartheid
In the first scene of I Afrikaner, Annalet Steenkaamp walks along the family estate with her grandfather, with whom she talks about his loyalty to the land that has belonged to them for decades. The man responds that when the time comes it is better to die on the ground, falling on it after the legs cannot bear the weight. The phrase is marked as an echo in the rest of the film, where the director investigates in the most intimate corners of her family to tell a story of roots and racial differentiation.
The Afrikaners are a white ethnic group coming from the first Dutch settlers in South Africa that after the end of apartheid were deprived of much of the political power but managed to maintain the economic one. Steenkamp films for over nine9 years the four generations who live in her house, characters with different ways of seeing the gestation of a new social system in a country with deep racial tensions that put in crisis the domestic environment of which they are part .