Scheer Intelligence: “Moffie” Links White Supremacy And Homophobia As Macho Perversions
“Moffie,” a new South African movie billed as an apartheid-era “queer war film,” tells the story of the closeted 16-year-old Nicholas (Kai Luke Brummer) and his conscription into South Africa’s military service to fight a war against communist Angola in the 1980s. The film, in movie theaters and On Demand platforms, is based on André Carl van der Merwe’s autobiographical novel “Moffie”–a homophobic slur. It explores with great nuance the complex realities of apartheid-era South Africa and the dangerous ideologies pervasive in its solely white male armed forces. On this week’s installment of “Scheer Intelligence,” writer-director Oliver Hermanus talks to host Robert Scheer about the many threads his film captures as it takes us back to a time and place in which racism and homophobia were both extremely deadly.