Skin

Ten-year-old Sandra (Ella Ramangwane) is distinctly African looking. Her parents, Abraham (Sam Neill) and Sannie (Alice Krige), are white Afrikaners, unaware of their black ancestry. They are shopkeepers in a remote area of the Eastern Transvaal and, despite Sandras mixed-race appearance, have lovingly brought her up as their white little girl. Sandra is sent to a boarding school in the neighboring town of Piet Retief, where her (white) brother Leon (Hannes Brummer) is also studying, but parents and teachers complain that she doesn't belong. She is examined by State officials, reclassified as Colored, and expelled from the school. Sandra's parents are shocked, but Abraham fights through the courts to have the classification reversed. The story becomes an international scandal and media pressure forces the law to change, so that Sandra becomes officially White again. By the time she is 17, Sandra realizes she is never going to be accepted by the white community. She falls in love with Petrus (Tony Kgoroge), a black man, the local vegetable seller, and begins an illicit love affair. Abraham threatens to shoot Petrus and disown Sandra. Sannie is torn between her husband's rage and her daughter's predicament. Sandra elopes with Petrus to Swaziland. Abraham alerts the police, has them arrested and put in prison. Sandra is told by the local magistrate to go home, but she refuses. Now Sandra must live her life, for the first time, as a black woman in South Africa with no running water, no sanitation, and little income. She and Petrus have two children, and although she feels more at home in this community, she desperately misses her parents and yearns for a reunion. After many more years of hardship and struggle, the chances of that reunion ever happening seem remote. But Sandra carries her father's advice with her wherever she goes: 'Never give up!' SKIN is a story of family, forgiveness and the triumph of the human spirit.