I, Afrikaner dir. by Annalet Steenkamp (review)

I, Afrikaner is a ninety-three minute Afrikaans film with English subtitles directed by Annalet Steenkamp, affectionately called "Makkie" in the film. The opening shot is a long close-up of an old windmill accompanied by the sound of the wind as it turns the rusty wheel. The camera then shifts to a long shot which shows dry, arid land and a figure that cannot be made out in the distance. And so, the nostalgic documentary begins as an indecipherable ode to Steenkamp's Afrikaner family and culture, as well as to the land, the agrarian landscape, and the soil. Steenkamp filmed four generations of her family for eight years before producing I, Afrikaner.

When Antjie Krog's autobiographical Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (Penguin Random House, 1998) was released against the backdrop of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and her own Afrikaner (generational) complicity, it evoked for the first time critical questions about the subjectivity of the apartheid perpetrator, figured primarily as "the Afrikaner." Similar tensions are encountered in I, Afrikaner, and one cannot but recall Krog's autobiography and the fictional film adaptation of it, In My Country (2004), as one watches Steenkamp's composition of more recent postapartheid Afrikaner culture. But differences exist in its material composition as a film as well as its thirteen-year progression in the sociopolitical context of South Africa. The film is not as burdened by, or as hopeful about, the sensibility of the immediate post-1994 moment. Although Steenkamp's eerie visual personal (and collective) memories do not directly reference or discuss South Africa's postapartheid TRC, the film is nevertheless deeply entangled in the events and outcomes of that watershed period. And thus necessarily, the film's cast, "Makkie's" family, is deeply entangled in the politics of the land (and its yet to occur redistribution). Steenkamp relies on constant visual provocation consisting of extreme close-ups of items and actions of everyday life alternating with long wide-angle shots, primarily of the dry, arid land. The regular return to images of the vacant land contributes to Steenkamp's construction of nostalgia for the past, for a time when the land must have been, like the elderly family members, young, green, and fertile.

Images of the ordinary shown in close-up—hair styling, the director's own grandmother holding a new baby in the family, old photographs, old furniture, her family in church, her brother getting married—evoke subjective feelings of nostalgia, loss, and helplessness. At the same time, the wide-angle shots of the land, the soil, and the red dust of the Free State evoke a sense of vastness—what appears to be an extended openness that in the film is not only the site of the generational "home," the farm, but now, in a postapartheid dispensation, a place of fear and feelings of threat and vulnerability. The film places a great deal of emphasis on this subject—and the family's efforts to protect themselves and their homes—although the film largely avoids naming and identifying who or what it is they fear. This element of the film is the proverbial elephant in the room, and its meaning—which is their need specifically to protect themselves from black robbers—is understood only if one is aware of postapartheid South Africa's racial and economic disparities. What the film does emphasize subtly and powerfully is the family's overall vulnerability in regard to matters of race, age, and the ongoing loss of Afrikaner identity, as well as the knowledge that they will never return to their former position of power.

As we follow the lives of "Makkie's" older family members, we are invited to view them from a position of empathy. The director's grandmother has left her husband and moved from the farm because she fears for her life. The director's sister-in-law suffers from posttraumatic stress disorder because of the...