MANDELA: LONG WALK TO FREEDOM IS THE PREQUEL TO THE 2009 FILM INVICTUS
Whereas Invictus shows President Nelson Mandela healing a nation during his first years in office, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedomis the story of his life up to his election as president. Based on Mandela’s autobiography and directed by Justin Chadwick, the film begins with Mandela as a boy in pre-apartheid South Africa who becomes a successful attorney (played by Idris Elba from this point) but is emboldened to respond as apartheid is instituted in 1948 (when he was 30), joining the African National Congress to protest apartheid nonviolently. His first wife cannot tolerate his absence as he leads protests; she leaves him, and soon he marries a more activist Winnie (Naomie Harris). One year after the authorities use deadly force in the Sharpeville Massacre (1960), he joins a group that engages in a bombing campaign, goes into hiding, and he is arrested and convicted of antigovernment sabotage. Although he expects to face the death penalty, he professes a desire for martyrdom, whereupon the judge decides to deprive him of his wishes. He is then sentenced to hard labor for life and confined at Robben Island. His initial barren cell and issuance of short pants, however, changes. The film shows an apparent inspection officer to whom Mandela complains, and later he receives long pants, friendlier conversation with some security guards, and a much more comfortable cell. One day in 1989, he is relocated to Pollsmore Prison on the mainland, as a worldwide campaign to free him serves to propel him into leadership in a country where the white political establishment wants to engage him in some sort of compromise so that they can shake off worldwide pressures on them to release him. (Neither UN condemnation nor the economic boycott of the country is mentioned in the film; nor is the word “apartheid.”) Later placed in a very fashionable house, yet now under house arrest, he is consulted by the country’s leaders to negotiate terms for a new South Africa. A new South African president—F. W. de Klerk (Gys de Villiers)—realizes that he must release Mandela to calm the country, and he does so in 1990. Upon his release, he realizes that Winnie has become an advocate of violence, contrary to his original vision of Ghandilike protest, and they split up. Mandela effectively persuades transformation-minded De Klerk to issue a new one-man-one-vote constitution. He then wins the presidential election in 1994, and the film ends. Nearly twenty years later, the world has been saddened by his death, coincidentally only six days after the release of Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom in Los Angeles. The movie is a fitting tribute to a political hero who overcame evil after a long struggle for goals that he proclaims in the film—justice and respect for all. The Political Film Society has nominated Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom as best film of 2013 in two categories—democracy and human rights. MH