FIRST OFF . . .

The anti-apartheid film, “A Dry White Season,” was shown five times in South Africa on Monday despite an earlier ban by censors. The film, based on South African writer Andre Brink’s novel, stars Donald Sutherland as a white liberal who tries to discover the truth about the deaths of his gardener and gardener’s son in police custody. It contains scenes of police opening fire on schoolchildren in the black township of Soweto in 1976 and security police torturing black prisoners. Organizers of a local film festival won the right to show the U.S.-made film from an official appeals board in Johannesburg. Prof. Kobus van Rooyen, chairman of the appeal board, said: “The truths in the film should be allowed to speak for themselves, as also should the cliches, the striving for emotional effect, and the biases.”