Endgame: a film on apartheid holds hope

In this business, we spend a lot of time mired in the misery of the world, so it was good last night to see a film, and chair a discussion, about how one of the most intractable problems in the world was solved.

It was the opening of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, and the film being premiered was Endgame, directed by Pete Travis and starring William Hurt and Chiwetel Ejiofor.

It tells the story of Michael Young, a businessman with Consolidated Gold, who decided that someone had to do something about the violent impasse in which South Africa found itself at the end of the 1980s. So he persuaded his boss to finance a series of secret meetings between key Afrikaaners and ANC leaders.

Over a period of five years he sat them together in a stately home in the English countryside and got them to open up to each other.

The breakthroughs, he told me last night, were not in the formal sessions but after hours. They drank. They talked. They told jokes. They began to lose their fears, and gain trust. That long, sometimes faltering, often painful, process was the beginning of the end.

The director, Pete Travis, explained how he used a restless camera and jerky big close-ups to recreate the tension and uncertainty of the time. When you look back, he said, the end of apartheid seems inevitable but that wasn’t how it felt at the time.

Those involved in ending apartheid advised the peace process in Northern Ireland. Now Michael Young’s hoping to tour the Middle East with the film.

OK, no situation is the same as any other, but it was good to be reminded that just because most of us can’t see the way forward, doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Maybe one day, we’ll look back and think that peace in the Middle East was inevitable…

 – A still from the film: Chiwetel Ejiofor as Thablo Mbeki 

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