The Long Road to Reconciliation

“It’s devastating,” says Archbishop Desmond Tutu. “But it is also very uplifting and a wonderful tribute to a remarkable people, the so-called ordinary people who were the real heroes and heroines of our struggle.”

“It” is “Long Night’s Journey Into Day,” a documentary (airing tonight on HBO) about South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission that won a best documentary award at the Sundance Film Festival two years ago and was nominated for an Oscar this year. What has devastated viewers of the film is the spectacle of apartheid victims and perpetrators confronting one another in bitterness, shame, anger, regret and, amazingly, forgiveness.

The film follows four case studies: the murder of American Fulbright scholar Amy Biehl by blacks, the killings of anti-apartheid activists (the “Cradock 4”) and a group of seven blacks from a Cape Town township (the “Gugalato 7”) by police, and the bombing of a bar by African National Congress guerilla Robert McBride.

While Tutu, who chaired the commission, notes that the film celebrates the ordinary people, it spares neither side of the apartheid question. Both were guilty of human rights violations, and the commission was established not only to ease the transition from white rule to black rule but to come to terms with these excesses and avoid an endless cycle of recrimination and violence. Victims were allowed to tell their stories, and perpetrators were given a chance to be granted amnesty if, in the opinion of the commission, they came clean about their crimes.

“An eye for an eye, as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, ends up with a society of blind people,” Tutu says.

That the movie got made and that it makes any sense is a minor miracle, much like the TRC itself. Deborah Hoffmann, who, along with Frances Reid, directed the film, says they picked these four cases out of thousands and stuck with them through thick and “a tremendous amount of thin.” For example, the hearings, which lasted five years and only recently concluded, unfolded 9,000 miles away. The San Francisco-based filmmakers flew to South Africa seven times, which worked out to about 2 1/2 weeks in the air. In one case, they found out when they got there that the hearing they’d come to shoot had been postponed.

Inevitably, as with all verite films, some interviews were not what they’d hoped for. McBride, obviously a key player in his own story, rather inconveniently was imprisoned in Mozambique for gunrunning and almost missed his amnesty hearing. The one impediment the filmmakers did expect, resistance from black South Africans, never materialized, perhaps because they were not white South Africans.

In the end, Hoffmann and Reid got what they wanted, which was a representation of a troubling process, with each case illustrating an aspect of it. The Cradock murders presented an example of a white applying for amnesty (80% of the amnesty applicants were black). The killings of the Gugalato 7 involved the participation of a black policeman (Thapelo Mbelo) employed by the white government. The McBride case was an instance in which a member of the African National Congress applied for amnesty.

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In perhaps the most problematic choice, the filmmakers decided on the Amy Biehl murder because it was the most accessible. Here was a white anti-apartheid victim whose parents not only forgave her murderers but also are Americans. Among the critics of this last selection is Sheila Nevins, executive vice president of original programming at HBO, who thinks they could have cut Biehl from the film. Though the filmmakers say they didn’t know she felt this way, they don’t necessarily disagree with her.

“It helps and hurts, depending on who the audience is,” Hoffmann says. “For some people, it’s really the entree. They wouldn’t have another way of getting in without the comfortable, familiar Biehls. And for other people it’s, ‘Why do we have to see Americans?’ ”

What clinched it for the filmmakers was the mother of one of Biehl’s killers. She seems ambivalent about the fact that her son was granted amnesty, not because she wants to see him punished but because she sympathizes so profoundly with Biehl’s parents. It’s one of several instances in which victims rise above self-interest. Another comes at the end of the film when one of the mothers of the Gugalato 7 confronts her son’s killer, rips him for betraying his own blood, and then, in a stunning reversal, forgives him.

“That’s what inspired us to make the film in the first place,” says Reid. “We were hearing those kinds of stories.”

This scene, and the whole concept of the TRC, raises the question of whether there is something peculiarly South African about this soul-searching and forgiveness.

“I think the [Nelson] Mandela factor has to be kept in mind,” says TRC deputy commissioner and New York University professor Alexander Boraine, referring to the fact that after Mandela emerged from 27 years in prison he forgave those who jailed him. “That example has been enormously influential in South Africa.”

Reid agrees but adds, “There’s a fairly strong cultural conception in South Africa called umbuntu, which is the idea that they’re all one. If you really believe that, then it’s hard to continue to separate yourself from somebody who has done wrong to you.”

Since their win at Sundance more than a year ago, Hoffmann and Reid have had a chance to see how the documentary plays in other cultures. The film was well received in South Africa, though audiences tended to be TRC supporters. Surely the weirdest moment had to be when, at the end of a screening there, a voice called out from the audience: “Oprah here.” It was Oprah Winfrey, who was in South Africa to interview Mandela. She asked Mbelo, who was in attendance, why he didn’t cry.

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Not all of the audiences were so welcoming. Palestinians, who related strongly with black South Africans, found the film unbearably painful. And Belfast, “was the single most difficult screening we’ve had,” Hoffmann says. “There was outrage at the concept of the TRC. There was outrage that Robert McBride had to go before the TRC.” In other words, McBride had nothing to apologize for, because he’d killed innocent people to further a cause.

Tutu has said that a concept like the TRC will never work in the U.S. until it abolishes the death penalty, renouncing retributive justice (punishment) and embracing restorative justice (reconciliation).

“Human beings,” says Tutu, “despite the fact that we have the capacity for untold evil, are ultimately made for goodness, for love, for gentleness, for forgiveness, for peace, for reconciliation.”

* “Long Night’s Journey Into Day,” tonight at 8 on HBO. The cable channel has rated it TV-PG-V-D (may be unsuitable for young children, with special advisories for violence and suggestive dialogue).