Director Nicolas Rossier zooms in on the enigma that is Frederik Willem de Klerk, the president of the South African apartheid regime – and as such at least morally responsible for the state’s human rights violations – who made a complete U-turn to mediate the release of Nelson Mandela and became vice president in his government. Through interviews with high-level key figures and de Klerk himself, Rossier confidently reconstructs the complex events that took place in the early 1990s in South Africa that marked the end of apartheid, echoing the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism in Europe. So, did De Klerk sense the zeitgeist and respond to it pragmatically, or was he a visionary who prevented a civil war by, for example, choosing exactly the right moment to allow Mandela to appear on TV? Rossier provides some of the answers and offers enough reasons to reconsider de Klerk’s role.
