Durban Film Fest Opener ‘Legacy’ Explores How History of Oppression Led to Broken Promises of Post-Apartheid South Africa
variety.comChristopher Vourlias Tara Moore’s “Legacy: The De-Colonized History of South Africa,” which opens the 45th edition of the Durban Intl.
Film Festival on July 18, is the South African-born, U.S.-based actor and filmmaker’s attempt to grapple with the brutal history of her homeland as it celebrates the 30th anniversary of Black majority rule.
Describing the film as an “exploration” of the long journey from the colonial era to the birth of a democratic nation, Moore examines how a legacy of systematic oppression that sought to quash the rights and hopes of the country’s Black majority laid the foundation for a modern nation still struggling to live up to its promise. “South Africa is the most unequal country in the world,” the director tells Variety. “The question is, why does it remain that unequal if we have democracy?
Why does that inequality persist if in ’94, by law, everything was supposedly equal? That’s the real question, and I think that’s what this documentary [tries to understand].” Moore was born in South Africa in 1986, in the dying years of apartheid, at a time when mixed-race marriages were illegal under South Africa’s white nationalist regime; as the first-time filmmaker puts it: “Much like Trevor Noah’s book, I was born a crime.” Her parents were academics — her mother, a political scientist, is a South African of Indian descent; her father is an economist from Canada — and she was raised between South Africa and Connecticut, where her parents taught at Wesleyan University and Trinity College.
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