In the South African drama Homecoming, the director, Norman Maake, portrays the sinister past of apartheid and the struggle for liberation while also delivering an upbeat and youthful perspective on the postapartheid present and future. This is the theme he established in his directorial debut, Sweet Home (1999), and then developed further in Soldiers of Rock (2003): the new South Africa meets the old.

Homecoming tells a powerful story of three friends who return home as ANC exiles with dreams of building a life in postapartheid South Africa in the 1990s. Based on the real-life experiences of the screenwriter Zola Maseko, a former MK (Umkhonto we Sizwe) soldier, the story inspired a successful mini-series of the same name produced by the South African Broadcasting Corporation.

Over the years, Charlie (Siyabonga Twala), Thabo (Tony Kgoroge), and Peter (Eric Miyeni) have built a strong friendship based on their common history, ideological beliefs, and fight for freedom. All three had fought during the 1980s as MK soldiers in the armed militant wing of the African National Congress (ANC) and had spent many years in exile. Despite their past as liberation fighters, each one represents social characteristics of a postapartheid generation at the time of the launching of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996. Charlie, the last one to return home, has developed a business plan to open a club, while Thambo is the family man devoting himself to reintegration into society and reconciliation with his family. Peter, the careerist and bureaucrat, works for the ANC officials in an investigation of traitors in past ANC operations. Peter’s investigations ultimately reveal that betrayal came from within, from the upper echelons down to his friend Charlie, who had been captured in one of operations of the ANC Chief Twala (Moshoeshoe Ghabeli). Unable to suffer the tortures inflicted on him, he sold out and shot a comrade in prison to seal his loyalty to the enemy. Charlie’s betrayal shatters his friendship with his two former comrades, his relationship with the newly befriended widow and son of another former colleague, and ultimately his own beliefs and ideology.

The plot unfolds in a spiral pattern, evoking the figure of the betrayer betrayed; Charlie’s degradation and dishonor are unveiled incrementally as they play out on the level of the individual and in terms of the national preoccupations with guilt, justice, and reconciliation with the past. The complex, ever-shifting positions of power within a society in search of its soul, humanity, and justice are highlighted when Charlie tracks down and asks his own torturer how it is possible “to forgive and forget. . . . If you kill and rape is it enough to say sorry?” Similarly, Thabo, in his attempt to sympathize with Charlie, asks “What would happen if I was tortured?” The film ruminates over moments of truth, justice, and the political hard knocks of the recent South African past and present. In the end, Charlie is killed in a shootout with Chief Twala himself, a sacrificial and cathartic event that proves that the process of healing is as painful as it is liberating.

Homecoming plays out creatively and steadily the significance of its title, moving from a pessimistic depiction of the past to an uncertain, yet affirmative, present, to a popular Afro-optimism for future generations. Similar in its themes to Forgiveness (dir. Ian Gabriel, 2004), Homecoming is distinguished by Maake’s youthful élan along with the realism of Maseko’s script. The ANC struggle for liberation is documented through authentic pictures and creative flashbacks, while intense camerawork shows familiar neighborhoods in bird’s-eye views and scenes of torture with excruciating close-ups. Nighttime distant shots, documenting the dark and treacherous circumstances of ANC armed operations, alternate with intimate conversations in dimly lit rooms between partners, comrades, and lovers. Despite an overall mood of melancholy, which intensifies with Charlie’s funeral at the end, the film’s cheery overtones become progressively more evident in the space of familial celebrations (a wedding, a birthday), in public places, and in playful compositions (kids singing on a school bus, shopping at the supermarket, playing soccer) to suggest both an individual and collective return and a mending of South Africa’s fragmented soul.