Skin is a film based in apartheid-era and post-apartheid South Africa, following the life of Sandra Laing, a black girl born to white Afrikaner parents. The story drops many anvils about racism and living as a black person in apartheid-era South Africa (to be expected, given the setting). The story progresses from when Sandra is a schoolchild, to when she begins searching for a husband, to casting her vote in the first free elections of a post-apartheid South Africa. The film was given 10 awards in 8 different film festivals and nominated for one in another. It features Sophie Okonedo as Sandra, Sam Neill as Sandra's father, Abraham, and Terri Ann Eckstein as Sandra's mother, Elsie.
Also based completely on a true story, as the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue will show you.
This film provides examples of:
- Chocolate Baby: Sandra, naturally. It averts the usual suspicions, however-Abraham never seems to believe that Elsie might have cheated on him, and he accepts Sandra as his own from the beginning. This becomes part of the problem as he (and the government, eventually) think of her as an Afrikaner girl, and it was not acceptable — or legal — for Afrikaner girls to marry blacks in apartheid South Africa...
- Disproportionate Retribution: What Abraham very nearly gets on Petrus. Thank God he was apparently trained in the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy.
- Papa Wolf: Abraham Laing drifts between this, Abusive Parent and Knight Templar Parent.
- Star-Crossed Lovers: Sandra and Petrus. They get together though. Then he turns into a Domestic Abuser...
