How wonderful it is to see this fine actress carry a film and carry it so beautifully.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Black Butterflies, a picture of the life of Ingrid Jonker (Carice van Houten) in South Africa during the years of Apartheid is a movie that leaves many impressions. She was a poet & the daughter of a South African MP or representative of an electoral district. Born to privilege, her mother died in an asylum she herself would later be admitted to herself. She showed signs of mental illness all her life & spent many of her days self medicating with sex & alcohol. Yet her talent with words is well documented in her poems.Being in conflict with her father's political beliefs she suffered an estrangement from him even when in the same room. It is well known that daughters who fail to receive the love they need from living fathers often turn to other men for love & approval. Sex, being the mechanism they try to use to obtain that that they lacked growing up, creating unstable relationships in their adult life too. They become a burden to those around them & not the first person you'd seek as a friend. Her choices as an adult leave a lot to be desired. Even her own daughter who she chose to leave motherless was used more as a crutch than an object of love & responsibility.She lived a life of mental turmoil in a country of extreme prejudice & hated that inequality. Unable to forget or assuage the pain of her circumstances, that pain grew over the years to choke her. Yet she became the voice of those that were declared less than human by her father's beliefs. A poem of hers was read at the first democratically elected South African Congress. It begins, "The child is not dead" She took her own life after having withstood all the pain & confusion she could in this life & that will always be controversial in this world. Who is to judge how a person that retains constant contact with mental agony so that it builds in them year by year with little or no relief is to be seen? We call those that overcome such circumstances heroes & hope we are like them. Yet those that see the inequities in this world & summarily reject such things for themselves while seeing them clear enough to describe them in verse, having those things enter their mind through their eyes on a daily basis, what can we say of them. Ingrid was a load to carry if you knew her & quite frankly I'm glad I didn't. I'm no fan of suicide either but I find more sorrow than condemnation in her passing. It is for certain that the people of a South Africa free of Apartheid see her as worthy of praise.Carice van Houten is excellent in portraying a life made of & lived by confusion. Rutger Hauer as her father & Liam Cunningham as her main love in life are strong in their roles as well. There is little in this movie that is shot as pretty or engaging scenery with the exception of the ocean. It's not intended to be pretty either in appearance or portrayal. Nudity is included but it is tastefully done. I was tempted to turn this off early on while they were displaying Ingrid's choices in life. It was a difficult watch to get through because of my dislike for her personality & life but I was glad I hung in till the end. I give it 4 out of 5 Amazon stars overall. 5 out of 5 for making me think through my reactions to it.It only rates 6.2 at IMDb but I think a lot of people quit on this one & rated it anyway.

After the death of their grandmother, young Ingrid Jonker (Carice van Houten) and her sister Anna were given to their estranged father Abraham (Rutger Hauer). He is an overbearing father and becomes the minister of censorship. She has a baby and can't get rid of her clingy husband. One day, she's rescued by writer Jack Cope (Liam Cunningham) and they begin a stormy affair.Maybe there is a compelling story in this person's bio. They didn't find it in this movie. Director Paula van der Oest has put in a lot of poetry and made a boring melodrama. The story has no excitement. Rutger Hauer plays domineering father well but he lacks menace and screen time. Ingrid Jonker's life is a mess and that's really all I got out of the movie.

The undeniable fact: we are born by parents. To be an individual: our responsible is to discard the parental form and replace our own. What we want to be and are. Guided by our very own ideas as model. Few reach this goal. A copy of what should be discarded. Not many manage and resume as copy their life. Among the not many is the life of Karin Jonkers. The fathers denial of his daughter, himself not only a writer but also a politician, made public in his speech his denial. The ultimate proof that both are individuals. Upright.Accepting the consequences. In public for all those cowards who choose the broad side of life. Like this his comment of her suicide has to be not only looked at but seen, reportedly he said: "They can throw her back in the sea for all I care." We have to, must as child of our parents discard the form we received at birth. By birth she was destined upper-class. Many are, growing up, revolutionary, sinking back into the comfortable frame of life. Even she. As it seemed. But consequently her loyalty was her own, focused on the South African questions many looked at, denying to see. Not caring what whoever told her to do: her divorced husband her lovers, her friend Jack Cope, himself a writer who always was there when needed. Nelson Mandela read her poem, "Die kind (wat doodgeskiet is deur soldate by Nyanga)" ("The child (who was shot dead by soldiers at Nyanga)"), in Afrikaans, during his address at the opening of the first democratically elected parliament on 24 May 1994.Ingrid Jonkers was homeless and in need of love. Apartheid, her father responsible for censorship was her enemy. Neither Jack Cope and Andre Brink helped or could help. She had to manage it alone. She was loved and loved but homeless. As it happened with the New Zealands poet and writer Janet Frame, also Ingrid Jonkers was periodical in a mental hospital: sent by her father! ... She and a few others home is the fringe of, what generally is called madness. But here, as society's fools, poetry and real life is the only true possibility. She is sane and insane. Not either-or but proofs that both is possible - as long as everything is given and nothing to loose and be taken.

This review was made for Cambridge Film Festival (UK) - 15 to 25 September 2011* Contains spoilers *As expected, Liam Cunningham (as Jack Cope) was excellent, but Carice van Houten, playing poet Ingrid Jonker, was a revelation. To those in the know, she perfectly carried out a role that betrayed the traits of impetuosity, feeling abandoned, blaming others, promiscuity, drinking too much in order to feel safe and able to cope, and becoming overwhelmed by conflicting emotions, which characterize some common personality disorders (they would probably have called them neuroses then).Yet, as is by no means inconsistent, her character was delightful, and she filled the screen with feeling, from seducing Jack, and showing the characters' hunger for each other in the very beautiful sex-scenes, to hurling objects at him with extreme force. There are claims that she has had other lovers, but Eugene and Jack, the ones who are definite, both find her draining, as well they would. A force for life is hard to live with, after all.Rutger Hauer as Ingrid's father (eerily resembling my former university tutor facially) has a harsh love (eventually, on account of her alleged sleeping around, he dismisses her as a slut), likely to have been one of the things that contributed to how she reacts to life and, through doing so in later life, the three psychiatric admissions that we see (or hear of), the last of them leading to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Although it is not always true that people are never the same after it, she is damaged.She is also damaged by the child whom she wished she had kept, and by the one fathered by Eugene, and which led her to desperate steps in Paris and that last admission. Whereas the film does not pretend to portray Ingrid's life or that of others who were close to her faithfully, hearing Carice (and, against his judgement, her character's father) read her verse will encourage a journey to look out her writing, not least given that is was allowed such a prominent place in the new South Africa.Maybe the real Ingrid wrote on the walls, maybe she didn't, but it set up a world in which desperate words written in the condensation in Paris were hurtingly real, and also tragically echoed her having made love to Jack in her old room at her father's house (the old servants' quarters), their bodies touching and mingling with her script.Not exactly a love-story, through she clearly does love Jack (but cannot be 'faithful'), but one about what it is to feel, love and live, and to write faithfully what one believes in, whatever the cost.