It was
commissioned by the movie's producers
because they want the rest of the story told too. It is being distributed--so
far--in the U.S., South Africa and China.
So, I am partial to the importance of the underlying history of the triumphant fight against a brutal and slave-like apartheid system that was set up to allow a white minority to dominate the black majority on the basis of racism and white supremacy.
Turning Mandela's story, based on his autobiography first drafted in prison, into a scipt inevitably requires leaving out a lot to capture the emotional intensity of the story. (Mandela originally asked the Producer who got the rights while he was behind bars if he thought anyone would want to watch a movie about him.
Screenwriter William Nicholson (Gladiator, Sarafina and others) underscores the fact that it is a drama, not a documentary. Happily a documentary was also made.
Making the movie took 15 years of money-raising, with more than 50 drafts of the screenplay and a shifting cast of actors and directors. Great attention was paid to historical detail in the sets and the setting, with period costumes made for the production and antique cars chronicling a life that goes back to 1918. It's the most expensive film ever made in South Africa.
It is also probably the weightiest and best, given the leading South African actors who have also been cast and the passion I saw in the production as well as among the more than 700 extras that worked on a project they could believe in.
The brilliant Justin Chadwick who made the Kenya-based story First Grader that integrated the suppressed story of the Mau rebellion directs. The formidable South African filmmaker, Anant Singh, produces.
It is not often that third world film companies get to tell their own stories, and get them seen in movie theaters globally.
There have been enthusiastic screenings of Long Walk in South Africa and at film festivals beginning with Toronto. It has premiered in LA, and at New York's Lincoln Center after a President Obama-hosted showing at the White House, and a bi-partisan Kennedy Center screening in Washington with Hilary Clinton, Colin Powell and Senator John McCain. It is also being shown at special community and school events, as part of an educational curriculum
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