Story of a Beautiful Country

“In order to understand your country, you have to make a journey,” a South African proverb says. Ten years after the abolition of Apartheid, filmmaker Khalo Matabane drives from his native village in the north to Cape Town in the south. Story of a Beautiful Country is a well-balanced road movie that in sometimes intimate, sometimes seemingly trivial conversations with passers-by exposes the ambivalent attitude many South Africans have towards their country. Some interviewees stay outside the van, others ride along in the backseat. It is a gorgeous country – everybody agrees on that. But the memories of Apartheid are still alive and to many people equality is still nothing but a slogan. “When you say that we have to move ahead, you really say I have to kill myself,” someone remarks. Because the past with all its painful recollections has not vanished. Matabane uses the car windows as the frame for his documentary; the camera only leaves the van at the end of the trip. It is obvious that much more is to be seen and heard in South Africa than the images and conversations the director presents to us. But in those discussions, he subtly raises the carpet under which optimists have tried to sweep hundreds of years of oppression.