Tropes:
- Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder: Anna starts a relationship with Langston as she spends more time away from her husband and family and develops a deep connection with Langston during the investigations into the Apartheid Crimes.
- All Germans Are Nazis: Or to be more exact "All Afrikaners are Amoral Afrikaner", a stance Langston firmly holds which Anna tries to avert.
- Ambiguous Situation: With the exception of De Jager, it is never explicitly stated which of the perpetrators who confess are pardoned (less than half were in real life) and which are put on trial. The judges are shown reacting favorably to the remorse of one perpetrator and openly skeptical of the claims two others make to justify themselves, but the scene always cuts away before the decision is made.
- Amoral Afrikaner: Quite a few unrepentant Afrikaner cops who brutally murdered innocent people appear. Subverted though by the repentant ones, and those like Anna who'd opposed Apartheid. Langston, however, an African-American reporter, initially sees them all this way.
- Armor-Piercing Response: At one point, Anna confronts De Jager, a particularly brutal perpetrator, and asks how he could think what he did was right. He replies "Ask your brother."
- The Atoner: One of the Afrikaner cops is extremely remorseful over having killed a boy's parents while he was Forced to Watch and begs him for forgiveness. The boy gives it by hugging him. Another one doesn't go quite this far, but is still also clearly distraught after confessing his murder of another activist.
- Believing Their Own Lies: Colonel De Jager and Boetie both tortured and brutally killed many black civilians, but insist that they were only protecting their country from terrorists.
- Break the Cutie: Anna goes through this big time. Seeing evidence of the Apartheid torture firsthand drives her to weeping fits throughout the film.
- Caring Gardener: Anderson, the Malan gardener, seems to care a lot about his work. His own main grievance at the Truth and Reconciliation hearings is that two policemen cruelly broke five trees Anderson grew in his own yard out of frustration that they couldn't find Anderson's fugitive son.
- Category Traitor: Anna is seen as this by her family by revealing the brutalities of the Afrikaner government against Africans and putting them in danger of reprisal by still vengeful Africans.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: The Afrikaner cops are described as doing this gruesomely and outlandishly to interrogate people for information, as broadcasted repeatedly Anna.
- Deadly Euphemism: A former Afrikaner policeman explains they would be told to "make a plan" regarding an anti-apartheid activist, which meant simply "murder them".
- Driven to Suicide: Boetie kills himself after being confronted by Anna about his acts of torture during Apartheid.
- Dumb Struck: One victim is a young black boy who had witnessed two white policemen murdering his parents and hasn't spoke since, clearly due to trauma. He silently grants forgiveness to one of the murderers by hugging him after the man has begged for it though.
- Electric Torture: One of the methods that the white Apartheid-era police used on suspects was electrocuting them.
- Forgiveness: A main theme of the film, with the ubuntu concept behind the whole featured Truth and Reconciliation hearings as perpetrators confess what they did in return for amnesty. On a lesser note as well, Anna confesses her affair to her husband, who manages to forgive this.
- Groin Attack: One victim who testifies at the hearings was tortured with electric shocks to his genitals, which made him impotent afterward.
- Hidden Depths: Anna is surprised to find out that her demure mother once went to a poetry conference in Paris and met Langston Hughes. She also had an extramarital affair with a Chilean poet around the same time, and it's clear some of their behaviors are In the Blood.
- Hired Help as Family: The black gardener at the Malans' farm was born there and has a good relationship with the Malan family.
- I Have Your Wife: Dumi desperately pleads that he only informed against activists as otherwise the police would have murdered his family instead. It doesn't save him from their vengeful comrades.
- The Informant: It's mentioned that several victims were identified to the police by informants, then were tortured before being murdered. Dumi turns out to have been such an informant, and gave up a man who'd then suffered this fate.
- Intrepid Reporter: Langston is shown as this, being ardent to reveal the brutalities of the Apartheid regime to the world and becoming an angry black man constantly exasperated by anti-African racism abroad and in America, especially when his editors choose to not put his article on the front page and dismissing the victims for being Africans.
- "It" Is Dehumanizing: A Torture Technician seeking amnesty repeatedly refers to his victim as "the subject," and not by his name.
- Just Following Orders: Several defendants say this word for word. A disgusted Langston compares them to the Nazis.Langston: Just as the Nazis claimed following orders exonerated them from guilt, so the South African perpetrators use that same defense. Is this the human condition? That men anywhere will commit atrocities so long as the law allows it?
- Last Request: One victim of the South African cops in the Backstory requested to be buried with the African National Congress flag. His killer granted the request.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: Reverend Mzondo is clearly a slightly fictionalized version of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who co-chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
- Not Enough to Bury: One farmer testifies about how his three year-old-son was blown up by a landmine set by black guerrillas, and all that the family could bury was a small piece of his skull.
- "Not So Different" Remark: De Jager tells Langston, who's horrified by the torture and murders he committed to defend Apartheid, that ANC fighters tortured one of his men to death, so badly his body was almost unrecognizable afterward.
- The Pardon: The focus of the film is on South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation process, where those who had committed atrocities during the Apartheid era would confess their crimes, ask forgiveness, then be granted amnesty. Most get it, but in the case of De Jager his crimes are viewed as so highly disproportionate that amnesty is denied and he will stand trial.
- Race Fetish: Implied subtly with Anna, who despite being married with children is shown being very comfortable around dark-skinned African men, even responding to a joke about being very happy with sleeping with two African men. This eventually makes her sleep with Langston along with extreme self-loathing over not doing more to speak about the Apartheid atrocities.
- Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Langston and Anna are particularly horrified at the torture farm to find police raped suspects there, either using objects or their genitals. They later learn that the police discovered prisoners, if raped repeatedly, would eventually give up information so it was done often. Anna later relates what she found to her family, who are unnerved. When she confronts her brother, who was involved with this, she tells him while she's capable of understanding many actions, that one is beyond her.
- Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: Dumi, on being discovered by the anti-apartheid fighters he'd been friends with from that time to have been an informant who'd given up a man whom the police killed, is shot dead by them.
- Sadist: Despite justifying this as defending his people, De Jager also says he'd really enjoyed torturing people to Langston too.
- The Scapegoat: De Jager feels that he's being made one by the former apartheid government, who had ordered him to commit the atrocities he did. Langston convinces him to turn on them and implicate higher officials as a result, since it will expose their complicity.
- State Sec: Most perpetrators of atrocities were with the state police during the Apartheid period, using such methods as outright murder and horrific torture against dissidents (whether violent or not).
- Stepford Smiler: Dumi is shown as cheerful and a party animal for much of the film, secretly ashamed and filled with self-loathing for being an informant for the Apartheid forces and getting many innocents killed in the process.
- Strike Me Down with All of Your Hatred!: Jager encourages Langston to kill him after revealing how much he enjoyed torturing African people to prove he's no different than himself: a man filled with bigotry and hatred. Only Anna's influence prevents Langston from going through with it.
- The Stool Pigeon: Anna's sound technician Dumi got several people killed by giving their names to the Apartheid cops. Whether he was forced to do it or was paid to is unclear.
- Torture Technician: One of the perpetrators seeking amnesty is a police officer who used Electric Torture on a prisoner severe enough that this left him impotent. He protests that it wasn't his intent, as he's not an electrician. The guy's probably the least sympathetic among perpetrators aside from De Jager and possibly the killer of Herbert Soblanda, only calling his victim "the subject" and using the old Just Following Orders defense.
- Turn the Other Cheek: The whole purpose of the hearings is for perpetrators of atrocities during Apartheid to confess (albeit often insincerely) and be confronted by their victims, while the government chooses to avoid mere vengeance. In one hearing, a police officer who admits to killing a young boy's parents gets down on his knees, begging for forgiveness. The boy grants it to him in the form of a hug. Anna must herself attempt to gain forgiveness from her husband by admitting her affair with Langston.
- Villain Has a Point: De Jager is an unrepentant rapist, torturer, and mass murderer. Still, he is correct to point out that many people in authority knew exactly what he was doing and approved of it, and that his superiors and certain media figures are emphasizing his monstrosity mainly just to make him look like a rogue operator.
- White Sheep: Anna tries to be one. She's an Afrikaner who opposed Apartheid and still does vocally when the rest had either supported it or were largely apathetic (including her family). Anna covers the hearing exposing the atrocities which were committed in the name of Apartheid to show herself as different in part due to her guilt over not doing more, but grows increasingly horrified by what she finds. In particular, her own brother had participated with the torture and murders the state police committed.
- Wide-Eyed Idealist: Anna is shown as this, believing in the cause of amnesty, exposing the truth behind the Apartheid cruelty, and a big believer in Ubuntu, basically an African concept of Karma. She also deeply cares for her homeland, considers herself African despite being denounced as a White Afrikaner, and declares she would die for her homeland despite her disagreements with its politics.
- Worthy Opponent: Brutal enforcer of Apartheid though he was, De Jager says he granted the Last Request of a prisoner he killed, burying him with the ANC flag because the man had been a brave fighter and that obviously earned him this much.
- Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: Some of the black anti-apartheid fighters were shown to be pretty ruthless as well, planting a landmine which ended up killing a white child, while torturing and murdering a white policeman who they captured much like the Afrikaners did to them. A black man who Langston meets who'd previously been an informant also gets murdered for it by them right in front of him. Still, they are definitely on the right side, and Langston sympathizes with them although he's still appalled naturally by witnessing the murder. De Jager and most Afrikaner cops insist on calling them "terrorists", though Langston refers to them as "guerrillas".
