The colour of love

OneWorld UK

By Daniel Nelson

Sandra Laing was black, born to white parents in apartheid South Africa. She is raised as white but while at school she is reclassified as "Coloured" and expelled. Her shocked father fights through the courts to have the classification reversed. He wins and Sandra is reclassified white.

That’s a good start to a story. But there’s more to come in Skin.

Realising in her teenage years that she is never going to be accepted by the white community, Sandra begins an affair – across the colour line and therefore illegal – with a black man, who sells vegetables to her parents’ store.

I could go on, but that would spoil the twists in the plot for readers who don’t remember or know what happened – because the film is based on a true story that caused a sensation, and illustrated the total idiocy of apartheid.

It’s important to remember, as with all “based on” films, that this is not documentary, not exactly how it happened. Nevertheless, the film suggests some of the subtleties of the love between Sandra Laing and her parents, though it doesn't come to grips with the emotions aroused on both sides by issues of race and sex.

Intriguingly, the story continues even today. Sandra Laing has opened a store like her father’s, Sandra’s Rainbow Tuckshop, and recently celebrated her 50th birthday, surrounded by family and friends. But in a radio interview in July she sounded rather sad and said the end of apartheid had come too late for her. Even more astonishingly, a note at the end of the film says that her two brothers still, to this day, refuse to talk to her. I would love to know more about the attitudes that lie behind that family rift.

As a film, it's limited in ambition and delivery (TimeOut cruelly and unfairly dismisses it as "un unmemorable biopic"), but it tells a fascinating story that's worth the price of a ticket.

* Skin is showing at the ICA, The Mall, SW1 on 24 July-6 August, and 8-13 August.

* Forward to freedom: The Anti-Apartheid Movement and the liberation of southern Africa