A World Apart

Tim's character: Harold
Release dates: July 1988, US
Directed by: Chris Menges
Written by: Shawn Slovo
Also starring: Barbara Hershey, Jodhi May, Jeroen Krabbe
Executive Producers: Tim Bevan and Graham Bradstreet

Synopsis

Set in Johannesburg in 1963, A World Apart is the semiautobiographical story of Shawn Slovo, the daughter of Joe Slovo, head of the South African Communist Party and one of two white members of the ANC executive council, and Ruth First, who was assassinated by a parcel bomb in Mozambique in 1982. JMolly Roth is a 13-year-old whose world is turned upside down when her father departs in the middle of the night not to return, leaving her journalist mother, Diana, both to take care of her children and to continue the political struggle. Much to Molly's confusion, Diana's involvement with the movement makes her distant because she fears she cannot trust her daughter with life-and-death secrets. The film is driven by the tension between Molly's resentment at what she perceives as her mother's neglect of the family, and her gradual acknowledgment of the importance of the political imperatives by which her mother is compelled.

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Excerpts from a diary kept by the film's screenwriter
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