I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

The Age of Commercialism

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Cry Freedom is a film about the political awakening of white South African journalist Donald Woods after meeting black activist Stephen Biko during Apartheid in the mid-1970s. The film was produced prior to the end of Apartheid in 1994 and was based on the experiences of Woods who fled South Africa following the murder of Biko in order to publish books about the activist. Cry Freedom, along with the song "Biko" by Peter Gabriel, played a role in making Steve Biko a more widely known figure around the world, and also helped make a star of Denzel Washington, who received an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Biko. The film is sometimes criticized as a "white savior" movie since it's primarily about Woods rather than Biko himself, but the political transformation depicted in the film is significant in its own right. Woods pursues the truth and is eventually convinced by Biko's radical argument, and as a result faced potentially severe consequences himself. Cry Freedom deserves credit for showing how systems of oppression operate, as well as for depicting the lengths people must go to in order to oppose such regimes.

Steve Biko was a black activist who tried to resist the white minority governed South Africa in much the same way as Gandhi tried to resist the British empire's colonialism in India. Richard Attenborough's film Cry Freedom is not about Biko or Apartheid as much as it is about Donald Woods, the white liberal newspaper editor who risked his life trying to tell Biko's story. The film has a jarring point of view switch after Biko dies in prison from tortuous behavior at the hands of South African "police". Woods, played by Kevin Kline, must choose whether to do the right thing and flee the country to publish books about Biko or allow his wife, played by Penelope Wilton, to pressure him into forgetting about the books. In that case, Biko dies in vain. What begins as a life-changing friendship between Biko and Woods degenerates into a standard by the numbers escape over the border yarn after Biko's death. Oscar-nominated Denzel Washington is good in only his fourth film as Biko, but something is wrong in a film that tries to depict the struggles of Apartheid by focusing more on the trials of a white family for more than half the film. Attenborough would have served his topic better by focusing on Biko's rise to prominence instead of beginning where Biko befriended Woods. Perhaps a black actor in a leading role in a 2 1/2 hour film wasn't exactly conducive to big box office, but the film was a tremendous box office flop anyway. Film politics aside, the film still entertains and sends a message or two, albeit, in PG-sanitized fashion. *** of 4 stars.

It's sad to view this film now that we know how the ANC got shafted by international capitalism. Biko died for nothing much. Woods achieved little. Yes, outright apartheid was abolished, but all the apparatus of power was reserved by the minority whites, leaving the ANC government more or less impotent. As Naomi Klein writes in The Shock Doctrine, in the talks between the black and white leaderships "the deKlerk government had a twofold strategy. First drawing on the ascendant Washington Consensus that there was no only one way to run an economy, it portrayed key sectors of economic decision making --- such as trade policy and the central bank --- as "technical" or "adminsitrative". Then it used a wide range of new policy tools --- international trade agreements, innovations in constitutional law and structural adjustment programs --- to hand control of those power centres to supposedly impartial experts, economists and officials from the IMF, the World Bank, the GATT and the National Party --- anyone except the liberation fighters from the ANC." The statistical results are horrifying, with not much change accomplished, and AIDS flourishing. Viewing Cry Freedom in this light is deeply ironic --- actually tragic. The ANC has transformed itself from being the solution to being the primary problem.

The story of Stephen Biko is told in very simple language by epic film director Richard Attenborough. "Cry Freedom" is in no way understated, yet it is subtle when required and forceful when needed, unlike the recent, gratuitous "Power of One", which went way too far. This is a well restrained and perfectly balanced film.Denzel Washington's Biko and Kevin Kline's 'Donald Woods' are both very well portrayed, George Fenton's African music is wonderful and the cinematography is at times show stopping.It's a menacing look at a country which even to this day, has a long way to go before a humanitarian balance is in place.Sunday, May 30, 1993 - T.V.