One hundred years after South Africa’s Natives Land Act restricted all members of “an aboriginal race or tribe of Africa” to less than 10 percent of the country’s territory, land reform remains a deeply contentious and unresolved issue. The rise of the African National Congress (ANC) to power and its pledge twenty years ago to implement a sweeping program of restitution, redistribution, and tenure reform has accomplished relatively little. The promise to transfer 30 percent of the country’s land from white farmers—who even after apartheid owned over two-thirds of the agricultural space—was postponed in 1999 until 2014 and again recently until 2025. Academic discussions of the failure of land reform revel in statistics, but less often do they capture the human face of one of South Africa’s most vexing problems. The American director Yoruba Richen’s Promised Land ably fills this gap, providing a compelling exploration of what land reform and its delays have meant for both white and black communities.

Richen frames Promised Land around the experiences of two communities near Johannesburg, where she began filming in 2004. In Mekgareng (Broederstroom), blacks have petitioned the government for land both long held and recently purchased by white farmers, who have organized to resist the claims. Removals during apartheid separated local peoples from traditional lands, including graveyards that remain on white farms, while older land purchases have come under criticism as coerced. Local farmers, some with their own century-old ties to their tracts, feel besieged. Siding with the claimants in their unresolved struggle is Roger Roman, a farmer who broke with the white community to become a land rights advocate after selling half of his own property. In the case of the Molamu family, hundreds of descendants of a single black landowner successfully reclaim land that their ancestor was compelled to sell under the Group Areas Act. Confronted with the claim, the majority of white farmers sell willingly, with a single individual refusing to part with his property. After the ANC abandons its “Willing Seller, Willing Buyer” policy, the holdout is among the first to have his land forcibly expropriated by the government, though his remuneration, by his own estimate, is inadequate to begin a new life. Proud of their new land, the members of the urban Molamu family who now own it nonetheless confront their inexperience with agriculture as they ponder their future.

Originally aired and partially funded by PBS’s POV series in 2010, Promised Land has all the hallmarks of the public television feature. Straightforward interviews and documentation of town hall meetings are linked by montages of the South African countryside at the center of the debate. The production clearly owes much to Richen’s background with ABC News, though the minimally narrated film demonstrates a clear political edge. It recalls elements of earlier advocacy like Jonathan Wacks’s Crossroads/South Africa (California Newsreel, 1980), which reveals the human impact of the destruction of a flourishing but illegal settlement outside Cape Town in the 1980s. As under apartheid, dislocation and visible inequality fuel frustrations in areas like Mekgareng to the point that the land issue has become “a ticking time bomb.” Richen clearly sides with claimants, as is visually evidenced in the juxtaposition of carefully selected personal histories with dramatic stock footage from the apartheid era. Aside from the activist Roman, most of the white people in the film seem paternalistic, tone-deaf, and unwilling to recognize the deep sins of the past. Notably lost between these two poles, however, are those who embraced the “Willing Seller, Willing Buyer” option, compelling one to ask whether the initial ANC policy made even a small movement toward reconciling the two communities.

Though the film argues that land reclamation is a delayed rectification of historic wrongs, a note of ambiguity runs throughout, providing a melancholy complexity to match its righteous anger. At the conclusion, the urbanized Molamu descendants appear unprepared for their new roles as agriculturalists despite their visible pride, anticipating government aid that is by no means assured. This final scene captures the film’s conflicted view of the ANC as unable, unwilling, and unmotivated to truly tackle this explosive issue, even as local people press their rights. In her overall negative assessment of the ruling party’s ineffectual policies, Richen sets Promised Land apart from the triumphalist narrative that has typified many films on Nelson Mandela’s new South Africa. It shares the mood of such documentaries as the recent Dear Mandela (Sleeping Giant Films, 2012) by Dara Kell and Christopher Nizza or David Yim’s short Landless (2007), both of which examine contemporary clearances of informal settlements. Offering strong critiques of ANC policies, Richen nonetheless seems to sympathize with the party’s herculean task in addressing the deep economic and social inequality engendered by decades of apartheid.

Promised Land provides a very human look at a vexing problem. It documents the hope, frustration, and anger of people on both sides of the land reform argument, privileging the stories of local black African communities whose experiences of apartheid and contemporary South Africa are indelibly linked. In so doing, it reveals the realities of life under the ANC that are a curious mixture of new opportunity and apparent continuity. The result is an honest, often moving rumination on the role of land ownership in South African economics, politics, and personal identities.