In a hidden war: The Bang Bang Club ****

This is the best South African-made film about the struggle yet

South Africans seldom get to see serious movies about our country. The local film industry tends to produce romantic comedies, cheap candid-camera skits or soap-opera dramas.

The Bang Bang Club is the exception to that rule. Like Gavin Hood's Tsotsi and Ralph Ziman's Jerusalema, this film offers a resonant and compelling insight into a turning point in the ANC's liberation struggle.

The film is set in Johannesburg and its surrounding townships in the early 1990s, during the time that Nelson Mandela was released from prison. The ANC cadres were staging protest marches, which rapidly turned into violent confrontations with the South African police and the army.

A group of photo-journalists for The Star newspaper were very much in the front line. Greg Marinovich (Ryan Phillipe), Ken Oosterbroek (Frank Rautenbach) Kevin Carter (Taylor Kitsch) and João Silva (Neels van Jaarsveld) risked their lives to show the brutality of these conflicts.

Picture editor Robin Comley (Malin Akerman) fought a tough battle to publish these photographs in the paper, because the ruling National Party imposed stringent banning orders to conceal this struggle from the South African public. But the pictures were snapped up by the foreign press. The images of the brutal repression in the townships showed the world what the Nationalists were doing as they clung to diminishing power.

The photographers gained the nickname "The Bang Bang Club" and in 2000, Marinovich and Silva published The Bang Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War, which not only examined their front-line experiences, but also explored the impact it had on them as individuals.

I was working at The Star and, subsequently, the Sunday Times, as a feature writer during that period, and as I sat down to watch the film, I was hoping that it would capture the mood and tensions of the time. What I saw was an astonishing, intelligent re-creation of those riots.

Director Steven Silver has captured the look, tone and impact of that period with style and accuracy. The film moves at a stunning pace, without descending into melodrama. The locations and the film's designs are impeccable and it is superbly shot, capturing the panic and pain of the township-dwellers. It shows us just how complex and difficult the situation was for the photographers, who were welcomed by some but attacked by others. It was great to see Alf Khumalo, a veteran photographer, in a role that emphasises the pressures on black journalists covering the riots.

There have, inevitably, been moans from some critics about the use of international actors. To the moaners I say, get over it. The story has been there all along. Anyone could have tried to make this movie, but they didn't. Silver and his cast did.

It's a thrilling movie that reveals the emotional impact on the guys who formed The Bang Bang Club. More importantly, it presents a vivid account of a seminal period in SA history. In my opinion, it's the best South African-made movie about the liberation struggle I have ever seen, and I hope that audiences will give it its due.