News Feature: Screen plays part in laying ghosts to rest

Hollywood has stayed true to Gillian Slovo's novel about grief and forgiveness, writes James Mitchell.

To face the men who murdered your mother and then watch them walk free is an experience many would prefer to bury. For the author Gillian Slovo, it provoked an exploration of the intimate bond between enemies.

Her novel Red Dust is a searing tale of grief, hate and forgiveness, and the story now comes to the big screen.

Set during South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, which aimed to peacefully resolve the bloodshed of apartheid by offering amnesty to those guilty of race-related crimes in exchange for the truth, the story is all the more poignant because of its deeply personal origin. Slovo's parents, white and Jewish, remain legends of the anti-apartheid movement. Joe Slovo, a founder of the commission, formed the African National Congress guerilla army with Nelson Mandela and later led the South African Communist Party. In 1982, Slovo's mother, Ruth First, a rabble-rousing journalist, was assassinated by a letter-bomb mailed by pro-apartheid extremists.

At the subsequent commission hearing, Slovo and her sisters came uncomfortably close to the killers, sparking one of the story's major themes.

"I was very interested in what I call 'the intimacy between enemies'. When there is a war on, you know what the enemy is but you don't know who they are and you don't want to know. It was the same for the murderers who killed my mother," Slovo says.

"When they applied for amnesty for our mother's murder, we got to watch them and spend time seeing who these people were, what they looked like, how their wives looked at them. I began to wonder, how do they look in the mirror and think 'Ooh, you're looking good today, now on with the day', as opposed to what I know they've done? I mean, how do they live with what they've done?

"Thinking about it like that was provoked by the truth commission because I would never have thought about it before. I would never have been put in a position of having to think about it, nor wanted to."

In Red Dust, a human rights lawyer, Sarah Barcant (Hilary Swank), attempts to defeat a commission appeal for amnesty by a white former policeman who holds the key to the location of his victim's body. That the story focuses on the injustice felt by the families of the murdered is fitting given it cuts so close to the bone for Slovo, who inherited from her parents a "consciousness of the need for social justice".

"There are issues to think about in this film that will endure even though the hearings are over," she says. "What would you do if somebody killed your son and then was going to get away scot-free? How would it feel? And also the urge of parents to want to be able to bury the son that they know is dead.

"I suppose to have an audience understand that if we were in that situation we too would feel the same way is part of making the world both a smaller and a bigger place."

Slovo admits to feeling nervous on handing her creation to Hollywood to adapt. She was well versed in the creative tussles that can occur (sisters Shawn and Robyn work in the industry) and had heard horror stories of fellow authors whose work was debased or rendered unrecognisable. The pragmatic author stayed at arm's length as an occasional script consultant and, surprisingly, the transition from page to screen was refreshingly angst-free.

"It's been done with a great deal of respect for the original book, not in the sense that they haven't changed things, which they have, but I think in the end the film has the same feel," Slovo says.

"I think I've been really lucky; I've heard of a lot worse. Of course, the more normal position is that they buy your book and that's the last you ever hear about it. It never gets to script stage and if it gets to script stage it certainly never gets on screen."

But most surprising is Slovo's take on the commission that freed her mother's killers. "It is an amazing example that South Africa has given to the world, that you can end an acrimonious battle and struggle so peacefully."

First Published in The Sydney Morning Herald and smh.com.au, November 2005.