Film Review: A fading historical footnote

"If I look at my career as a president I really have no regrets.

What I did prevented a catastrophe in South Africa," says now 78-year-old Frederick Willem de Klerk, the last white president of the country, in The Other Man, a new documentary about De Klerk and his role in leading South Africa on the path to democracy. The film premieres this week at the Durban International Film Festival.

Three years in the making, US filmmaker Nicolas Rossier's film, while slickly executed and full of the kind of emotive archive footage that one expects in these productions, struggles to penetrate beyond the facade cultivated by this politician over the last two decades.

Interviews with high-profile characters such as Thabo Mbeki, Richard Goldstone, Albie Sachs, Chester Crocker, Matthews Phosa, Leon Wessels and Alistair Sparks give weight to the importance of De Klerk's leadership in steering the National Party towards the light at the end of the 1980s.

However, De Klerk's belief in separate development as a system that led to a ''big, big improvement of the physical lot of black people in South Africa", is not stringently challenged enough. It seems the biggest influence on moving from the verkrampte to the verligte wing of the party was his brother Wimpie.

De Klerk's personal life plays a minor role in the film. Aside from mentions of the ''love match" between him and first wife Marike, there is no examination of his affair with Elita Georgiades. The murder of Marike is not dealt with, and his children are not interviewed . The focus is steadfastly on the man as politician, although we do get to watch him play golf for a few seconds.

In one scene a young woman in Soweto is shown that famous picture of Nelson Mandela and De Klerk holding each other's raised hands. It takes her a while but she manages to identify "the white guy" as De Klerk.

What she thinks of him she isn't able to say.

In democratic South Africa we have short memories when it comes to anything that happened before 1994 and the idea that De Klerk's contribution should be acknowledged is a noble one supported by many of the interviewees in the film.

In spite of the evidence, De Klerk still refuses to make concessions on some of the other questions, particularly with regard to the fact that 14000 of the 21000 deaths during apartheid occurred on his watch.

While he apologised for apartheid on behalf of the National Party at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996, De Klerk denied he had any knowledge of assassinations or targeted killings. He claimed the murders carried out against enemies of the apartheid state by death squads such as Eugene de Kock's Vlakplaas unit were the actions of a few rotten apples who were overzealous in their interpretation of orders from above.

In the film's brief Frost/Nixon moment, De Klerk sits in the glow of the camera lights, and when asked about his testimony at the TRC by Rossier, is adamant he was under oath and everything he told the commission was the truth.

That's as close as the film comes to getting its subject to deal with an uncomfortable aspect of his story. Beyond that it is a reasonably reverential look at an undeniably important historical figure who remains, in spite of everything, too elusive for the camera to truly capture.

• 'The Other Man' screens tomorrow at 8.45pm at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre, www.durbanfilmfest.co.za

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