We have the right to say that it hurt.
-Alex Mpondo
Red Dust is a movie about apartheid, truth, forgiveness, and reconciliation. It’s a combination of mystery and morality play that kept me riveted from beginning to end.
The movie really helped me cement my new, post-evangelical understanding of forgiveness. It’s a much more demanding forgiveness which requires both victim and perpetrator to fully inventory the exact nature and consequences of harm, and then choose to re enter relationship. It’s a dizzying, overwhelming, intense, gut wrenching type of forgiveness which requires a lot.
As the movie progresses, you can see that these characters, in the process of wrestling through memories they had forgotten, and would rather continue to forget, are becoming more alive, and more human.
Having looked the beast in the eye, having given and received forgiveness, let us shut the door on the past, not to forget it, but to allow it not to imprison us.
-Desmond Tutu
It seems to me that international peace is impossible without this type of forgiveness. What do you think?
*warning: this movie contains graphic depictions of brutal torture
03-09-2007 |
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