Thursday, July 08, 2021

Review of 'Promised Land' (2002)

Came across this pretty much by accident while looking for the other 'Promised Land' with Matt Damon and Frances McDormand. This is a different film altogether, though as with that one the title is ironic. It's in Afrikaans, and set mainly among Afrikaners in the world of immediate post-Apartheid South Africa. The main characters are a farming family in a bleak, dry spot, to which a young man who's been living in London returns after the death of his mother. 

It's creepy, and violent, and a bit cliched ("You don't understand our ways, you don't belong here any more"), but not without interest. Apparently it's based on an award winning novel. A curiosity is that it features Yvonne van den Bergh, an Afrikaner actor who went on to become a big thing in South African TV before outing herself as a dominatrix and then going all out into porn. It's supposed to be the other way round, isn't it?

Whole film was available on YouTube.

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