Directed by Political Film Society awardwinner Phillip Noyce (for The Quiet American), the movie Catch a Fire is a biopic about Patrick Chamusso (played by Derek Luke), a Black South African who at the beginning is enjoying a wedding celebration in the year 1980. As the film progresses, he is depicted as a family man with two daughters who works as a foreman at the Secunda oil refinery in the Transvaal, coaches a soccer team of young boys, and eschews efforts of his mother-in-law to listen to radio broadcasts by the African National Congress. On the way home from the wedding, he is interrogated briefly and somewhat harshly about a recent act of defiance committed by the ANC. One day, he takes his soccer team to a competition match, after which he calls in sick to his boss at the refinery so that he can spend the night with a girlfriend and son at some distance from the soccer match. But that very night a bomb goes off at Secunda, so all the Black workers are under suspicion. Colonel Nic Vos (played by Tim Robbins) is in charge of the investigation; based in part on the fact that weapons used by the ANC come from the Soviet Union, he believes that Moscow is directing the ANC and will take over if the apartheid government is overthrown. Patrick is among those arrested for questioning. After he is first tortured, Vos plays “good cop.” Patrick’s whereabouts that night are a puzzle to Vos, but Patrick at first refuses to admit his infidelity. Later, when Patrick says that he visited a girlfriend in another town, Vos does not believe him. After Vos arranges to have Patrick’s wife tortured, Patrick gives an obviously false confession of his involvement, and Vos has him released. However, Patrick’s wife realizes that he visited his other woman, so their relations become somewhat distant when he returns home. Accordingly, Patrick decides to join the ANC in his native Mozambique, where he joins the armed unit of the ANC that was being trained by Lithuanian Joe Slovo (played by Malcolm Purkey), then president of the South African Communist Party. Soon after Patrick arrives, the training camp is bombed; he then goes to Angola, plots to bomb Secunda again, carries out the mission, is arrested, and sent to exile in 1981 on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela and a thousand or so others were detained within sight of Capetown. At the end of the film, in 1991, Patrick and other freedom fighters are released (though Mandela had been transferred in 1982 to a prison in a Capetown suburb). Film footage of the real Patrick Chamusso appears at the end of the film, including the Two Sisters orphanage, which provides a home to orphans of those murdered under apartheid that Patrick now runs. Some fifteen years earlier, such films about the evils of apartheid as The Power of One (1992), which won a Political Film Society award, tended to focus on the role of Whites in the struggle, so Catch a Fire is long overdue as a depiction of one of the thousands of Blacks who gave their lives to end apartheid. However, there is a more contemporary message in the film. Patrick was branded a terrorist; in one scene he is waterboarded, and he is roughed up in other scenes, leaving his face bloodied. Clearly, the torture that he received for a crime that he did not commit turned him against the South Africa to which he had accommodated himself. An obvious question raised is what has happened to those released from Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo for crimes that they did not commit. An interesting element in the film is that the screenwriter, Shawn Slovo, is Joe Slovo’s son, and a title dedicates the film to his memory. MH
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