Apartheid From Black Point of View : Movies: Actor-turned- director Morgan Freeman calls ‘Bopha!’ a film ‘that goes right to the heart of the black community and stays there.’

Hordes of children watch wide-eyed as a blazing gasoline-soaked car tire engulfs its victim in flames. This time, though, fire buckets are at the ready for the “necklacing,” and no one is harmed.

This infamous method of execution in South Africa will become an opening scene in the first major anti-apartheid drama to be made by a predominantly black team of American filmmakers.

“This is the first one that goes right to the heart of the black community and stays there,” said actor-turned-director Morgan Freeman.

Nominated for an Academy Award as best actor for his performance in 1989’s “Driving Miss Daisy,” Freeman is directing “Bopha!,” a story based on South African writer Percy Mtwa’s play.

“Bopha!”--derived from the word for arrest in Xhosa (in the Niger-Congo language family)--is set in the townships around Johannesburg during student uprisings against the white-run education system in the mid-1970s.

A black policeman and his wife, played by Danny Glover and Alfre Woodard, reach a watershed in their lives when their son joins student militants.

“It tells a story from a black perspective, but I don’t think it’s only a black film. It’s about universal human dilemmas that could equally apply in Bosnia, or any city in the United States,” said producer Lawrence Taubman.

Paramount Pictures agreed to distribute the film worldwide after talk-show host Arsenio Hall “responded to the poignant story and felt it necessary to push a studio into seeing it would work,” Taubman said.

The movie probably wouldn’t have been made without Hall’s involvement as executive producer, he said.

Previous anti-apartheid movies have fared poorly at the box office and mostly saw the issue through the eyes of liberal white protagonists.

“Cry Freedom” focused more on Kevin Kline as a white journalist than on Denzel Washington as black activist Stephen Biko. “A Dry White Season” starred Donald Sutherland as a schoolteacher who gets a political education and “A World Apart” starred Barbara Hershey as a political activist.

Freeman himself acted in a movie that fell into the same pattern, playing the trainer to a white boxer who’s the focus of “The Power of One.” An exception to this pattern was the recent “Sarafina!,” which chronicled the student township revolts.

Woodard--who played Winnie Mandela in a 1987 made-for-cable TV movie in which Glover played black South African leader Nelson Mandela--said the new movie looks at the implications of apartheid for South Africa’s 30 million black majority.

“When you see on TV news a black policeman firing into a crowd, you ask: ‘What is that person thinking?’ ” she said.

In the film, as the wife of a veteran police sergeant, she is ostracized by fellow township blacks and, as the political crisis deepens, her home is firebombed and raked with gunfire. Her husband is forced to arrest their son.

“His conflict is a fear of change. He’s the embodiment of his job and he’s torn between duty, family and his own people,” said Glover.

Though invited to South Africa by Mandela, Glover has yet to visit. “After you’ve spent half your life denouncing apartheid, it’s hard just to abandon that. I’ll go in due time,” he said.

In “Bopha!” South African Maynard Eziashi plays the policeman’s son and British actor Malcolm McDowell is a cynical white officer, the foil to Glover’s inner torments.

Freeman, who grew up in the South at the height of the struggle for civil rights, conceded that the future will leave South Africans to tell their own apartheid story.

“These days, unless you’ve got your head in the sand, you’ve got to be aware of the situation in South Africa,” Freeman said. “I don’t think I am any more qualified to make this movie than a white director although I might have a more visceral connection with the problems of segregated life.”