It has arrived a little late in the day, but Anthony Fabian’s tragic factual tale of a black South African girl born, apparently due to a genetic quirk, to white Afrikaner parents during the apartheid era is all the more extraordinary for being true.

Sandra Laing (Sophie Okonedo), the girl in question, was cherished by her parents (Sam Neill and Alice Krige), sent to a whites-only school, banished from it by the authorities, classified coloured and then reclassified as white after her father mounted a campaign.

After that, she “betrayed” her father by falling in love with a black vegetable seller and going to live with him in Swaziland. Her husband accused her of being a white in disguise and beat her. Her brothers took her father’s side but her mother hoped for a reconciliation.

The story illustrates the way Apartheid tore families as well as races apart and tells of Sandra’s 30-year-struggle with unflamboyant skill. Fabian, it is true, might have made it a bit more cinematic but, in opting for a straight narrative within a flashback structure, at least he avoids melodrama and his cast serve him well.
You could hardly call this a timely film but it does remind us of the evils of racism and the misery it causes.