Catch a Fire

The story of a real man, Patrick Chamusso. Under apartheid he was a foreman at Secunda in South Africa, the largest synthetic fuel plant in the world; he had nothing to do with politics, he coached a football team, and he kept his distance from organising against the regime. In 1980 he was arrested after an attempted sabotage of the plant. He had not done it. He and his wife were tortured during the interrogation. By the time he was released he was somebody else, and before long he had joined the ANC and really did bomb Secunda. The film's actual subject is how a state turns a person into the criminal it accuses him of being. The security officer played by Tim Robbins is not written as a monster; he has a family, a logic and reasons of his own, which is what makes him harder to watch. Shawn Slovo wrote the screenplay. She is the daughter of Joe Slovo, one of the best-known figures of the anti-apartheid struggle, and the script's forgiving tone comes from there. After his release the real Chamusso married, and he and his wife have cared for more than seventy AIDS orphans through the charity they founded. Watching the film without knowing that leaves half of what it is reaching for out of the frame.