15 Films & TV Shows Set In South Africa During The 1970s
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Escape from Pretoria
🇿🇦 South Africa The 1970sSurvival is key — South Africa, 1978. Tim Jenkin and Stephen Lee, two white political activists from the African National Congress imprisoned by the apartheid regime, put a plan in motion to escape from the infamous Pretoria Prison.
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The Harvesters
🇿🇦 South Africa The 1970sSouth Africa, Free State region, isolated stronghold to the Afrikaans white ethnic minority culture. In this conservative farming territory obsessed with strength and masculinity, Janno is different, secretive, emotionally frail. One day his mother, fiercely religious, brings home Pieter, a hardened street orphan she wants to save, and asks Janno to make this stranger into his brother. The two boys start a fight for power, heritage and parental love.
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Winnie
🇿🇦 South Africa The 1950s The 1960s The 1970s The 1980sWhile her husband served a life sentence, paradoxically kept safe and morally uncontaminated, Winnie Mandela rode the raw violence of apartheid, fighting on the front line and underground. This is the untold story of the mysterious forces that combined to take her down, labeling him a saint, her, a sinner.
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Rush
New York England 🇳🇱 Netherlands 🇪🇸 Spain 🇦🇹 Austria 🇮🇹 Italy 🇩🇪 Germany 🇯🇵 Japan 🇿🇦 South Africa 🇧🇷 Brazil The 1970sEveryone's driven by something. — A biographical drama centered on the rivalry between Formula 1 drivers James Hunt and Niki Lauda during the 1976 Formula One motor-racing season.
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Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
🇿🇦 South Africa The 1970s The 1980s The 1990s The 1960s The 1940sIt is an ideal for which I am prepared to die. — A chronicle of Nelson Mandela's life journey from his childhood in a rural village through to his inauguration as the first democratically elected president of South Africa.
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Goodbye Bafana
🇿🇦 South Africa The 1970s The 1980s The 1960sThe true story of a white South African racist whose life was profoundly altered by the black prisoner he guarded for twenty years. The prisoner's name was Nelson Mandela.
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Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation
🇦🇴 Angola 🇳🇦 Namibia 🇿🇦 South Africa The 1970s The 1960sNamibia: The Struggle for Liberation is a 2007 epic film on the Namibian independence struggle against South African occupation as seen through the life of Sam Nujoma, the leader of the South-West Africa People's Organisation and the first president of the Republic of Namibia.
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Faith Like Potatoes
🇿🇲 Zambia 🇿🇦 South Africa The 1970s The 1980sFrank Rautenbach leads a strong cast as Angus Buchan, a Zambian farmer of Scottish heritage, who leaves his farm in the midst of political unrest and racially charged land reclaims and travels south with his family to start a better life in KwaZulu Natal,South Africa.
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The Color of Friendship
District of Columbia 🇿🇦 South Africa The 1970sMahree Bok lives on a farm in South Africa. Her father is a policeman who cannot hide his joy when activist Steve Biko is caught by the South African authorities. Piper Dellums is the daughter of a US congressman from California and who lives in a nice home in Washington DC. When Mahree is chosen to spend a semester at the Dellums' house, she doesn't expect that her host family would be black. Nor do her hosts suspect that she is not a black South African.
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Sarafina!
🇿🇦 South Africa The 1970sShe was their teacher. They were her hope. — The plot centers on students involved in the Soweto Riots, in opposition to the implementation of Afrikaans as the language of instruction in schools. The stage version presents a school uprising similar to the Soweto uprising on June 16, 1976. A narrator introduces several characters among them the school girl activist Sarafina. Things get out of control when a policeman shoots several pupils in a classroom. Nevertheless, the musical ends with a cheerful farewell show of pupils leaving school, which takes most of act two. In the movie version Sarafina feels shame at her mother's (played by Miriam Makeba in the film) acceptance of her role as domestic servant in a white household in apartheid South Africa, and inspires her peers to rise up in protest, especially after her inspirational teacher, Mary Masombuka (played by Whoopi Goldberg in the film version) is imprisoned.
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A Dry White Season
🇿🇦 South Africa The 1970sDuring the 1976 Soweto uprising, a white school teacher's life and values are threatened when he asks questions about the death of a young black boy who died in police custody.
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Cry Freedom
🇧🇼 Botswana 🇱🇸 Lesotho 🇿🇦 South Africa The 1970sA dramatic story, based on actual events, about the friendship between two men struggling against apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s. Donald Woods is a white liberal journalist in South Africa who begins to follow the activities of Stephen Biko, a courageous and outspoken black anti-apartheid activist.
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Game for Vultures
England 🇿🇼 Zimbabwe 🇳🇦 Namibia 🇿🇦 South Africa The 1970sIn every war there are those who kill... and those who make a killing! — The South African businessman David Swansey is delivering illegal German helicopters to Rhodesia. That makes the patriot Gideon Marunga an angry man.
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The Wild Geese
England 🇿🇼 Zimbabwe 🇸🇿 Eswatini 🇿🇦 South Africa Africa - General The 1970sA British multinational company seeks to overthrow a vicious dictator in central Africa. It hires a band of (largely aged) mercenaries in London and sends them in to save the virtuous but imprisoned opposition leader who is also critically ill and due for execution. Just when the team has performed a perfect rescue, the multinational does a deal with the vicious dictator leaving the mercenary band to escape under their own steam and exact revenge.
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The Wilby Conspiracy
🇧🇼 Botswana 🇿🇦 South Africa The 1970sIn the fight for freedom, you have to break all the rules. — Having spent 10 years in prison for nationalist activities, Shack Twala is finally ordered released by the South African Supreme Court but he finds himself almost immediately on the run after a run-in with the police. Assisted by his lawyer Rina Van Niekirk and visiting British engineer Jim Keogh, he heads for Capetown where he hopes to recover a stash of diamonds, meant to finance revolutionary activities, that he had entrusted to a dentist before his incarceration. Along the way, they are followed by Major Horn of the South African State security bureau and it becomes apparent that he has no intention of arresting them until they reach their final destination
