50 Films & TV Shows Set In South Africa During The 20th Century
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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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Moffie
🇿🇦 South Africa The 1980sMoffie (a derogatory Afrikaans term for a gay man) follows the story of Nicholas van der Swart: from a very young age, he realises he is different. Try as he may, he cannot live up to the macho image expected of him by his family, by his heritage. Set during the South African border war against communism, this is a long-overdue story about the emotional and physical suffering endured by countless young men.
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The Forgiven
🇿🇦 South Africa The 1990sRacist. Prisoner. Murderer. Child of God. — After the end of Apartheid, Archbishop Desmond Tutu meets with a brutal murderer seeking redemption.
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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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Mandela's Gun
🇿🇦 South Africa The 1960sMANDELAS GUN is a political thriller, based on Mandelas African Odyssey.
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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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Searching for Sugar Man
🇿🇦 South Africa Michigan The 1990sGreat Art Always Survives — Two South Africans set out to discover what happened to their unlikely musical hero, the mysterious 1970s rock 'n' roller, Rodriguez. The film won Best Documentary at the 85th Academy Awards.
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The Bang Bang Club
🇿🇦 South Africa The 1990sSometimes you get too close — In the early to mid '90s, when the South African system of apartheid was in its death throes, four photographers - Greg Marinovich, Kevin Carter, Ken Oosterbroek and João Silva - bonded by their friendship and a sense of purpose, worked together to chronicle the violence and upheaval leading up to the 1994 election of Nelson Mandela as president. Their work is risky and dangerous, potentially fatally so, as they thrust themselves into the middle of chaotic clashes between forces backed by the government (including Inkatha Zulu warriors) and those in support of Mandela's African National Congress.
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Spud
🇿🇦 South Africa The 1990sIt's South Africa 1990. Two major events are about to happen: The release of Nelson Mandela and, more importantly, it's Spud Milton's first year at an elite boys only private boarding school. John Milton is a boy from an ordinary background who wins a scholarship to a private school in Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa. Surrounded by boys with nicknames like Gecko, Rambo, Rain Man and Mad Dog, Spud has his hands full trying to adapt to his new home. Along the way Spud takes his first tentative steps along the path to manhood. (The path it seems could be a rather long road). Spud is an only child. He is cursed with parents from well beyond the lunatic fringe and a senile granny. His dad is a fervent anti-communist who is paranoid that the family domestic worker is running a shebeen from her room at the back of the family home. His mom is a free spirit and a teenager's worst nightmare, whether it's shopping for Spud's underwear in the local supermarket
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Master Harold... and the Boys
🇿🇦 South Africa The 1950sThis movie is of Hally, an adolescent white South African. He is stuck between his intolerant father's outlook of him and those of his caretaker, Sam. Sam is a black waiter and Hally's friend and teacher. Hally is required to laugh at his father's racist jokes, by contrast, Sam exposes Hally to uplifting experiences. One day Hally was terribly humiliated by his father and Sam shows Hally how to be proud of something he can achieve.
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Endgame
🇿🇦 South Africa The 1980sThe time is the late '80s, a crucial period in the history of South Africa. President P.W. Botha is hanging on to power by a thread as the African National Congress (ANC) takes up arms against apartheid and the country tumbles toward insurrection. A British mining concern is convinced that their interests would be better served in a stable South Africa and they quietly dispatch Michael Young, their head of public affairs, to open an unofficial dialogue between the bitter rivals. Assembling a reluctant yet brilliant team to pave the way to reconciliation by confronting obstacles that initially seem insurmountable, Young places his trust in ANC leader Thabo Mbeki and Afrikaner philosophy professor Willie Esterhuyse. It is their empathy that will ultimately serve as the catalyst for change by proving more powerful than the terrorist bombs that threaten to disrupt the peaceful dialogue.
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District 9
🇿🇦 South Africa The 2010s The 1980sYou are not welcome here. — Thirty years ago, aliens arrive on Earth. Not to conquer or give aid, but to find refuge from their dying planet. Separated from humans in a South African area called District 9, the aliens are managed by Multi-National United, which is unconcerned with the aliens' welfare but will do anything to master their advanced technology. When a company field agent contracts a mysterious virus that begins to alter his DNA, there is only one place he can hide: District 9.
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Invictus
🇿🇦 South Africa The 1990sHis people needed a leader. He gave them a champion. — Newly elected President Nelson Mandela knows his nation remains racially and economically divided in the wake of apartheid. Believing he can bring his people together through the universal language of sport, Mandela rallies South Africa's rugby team as they make their historic run to the 1995 Rugby World Cup Championship match.
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Skin
🇿🇦 South Africa The 1950sBased on the true story of a black girl who was born to two white Afrikaner parents in South Africa during the apartheid era.
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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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The World Unseen
🇿🇦 South Africa The 1950sA drama centered on two women who engage in a dangerous relationship during South Africa's apartheid era.
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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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Catch a Fire
🇿🇦 South Africa The 1980s The 1990sThe spark that ignites us, unites us. — The true story of anti-apartheid activists in South Africa, and particularly the life of Patrick Chamusso, a timid foreman at Secunda CTL, the largest synthetic fuel plant in the world. Patrick is wrongly accused, imprisoned and tortured for an attempt to bomb the plant, with the injustice transforming the apolitical worker into a radicalised insurgent, who then carries out his own successful sabotage mission.
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Blood Diamond
🇸🇱 Sierra Leone 🇿🇦 South Africa 🇬🇳 Guinea 🇱🇷 Liberia The 1990sIt will cost you everything. — An ex-mercenary turned smuggler. A Mende fisherman. Amid the explosive civil war overtaking 1999 Sierra Leone, these men join for two desperate missions: recovering a rare pink diamond of immense value and rescuing the fisherman's son, conscripted as a child soldier into the brutal rebel forces ripping a swath of torture and bloodshed countrywide.
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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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Alive in Joburg
🇿🇦 South Africa The 1990sA documentary-style short film about the arrival of an alien spaceship over Johannesburg, South Africa.
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In My Country
🇿🇦 South Africa The 1990sA South African Story of Truth, Love and Reconcilliation — An American reporter and an Afrikaans poet meet and fall in love while covering South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings.
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Drum
🇿🇦 South Africa The 1950sThe truth shall set you free — A hot-shot journalist is swept up in a movement to challenge Apartheid in 1950s South Africa.
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