This tells the heartbreaking true story of Sandra Laing (Sophie Okonedo), the daughter of lower-middle-class Afrikaner parents, who in 1964 was reclassified as being of mixed race at the age of 10. After her father (Sam Neill) fights for her reinstatement (her colour was due to her "polygenetic inheritance"), she is torn between the black and white communities. Her father disowns her when she has a child by a charming, abusive black man and she loses contact with her family and is isolated in the black community. It is salutary to be reminded 15 years after South Africa's first free election just what an iniquitous practice apartheid was and the physical and psychological damage it wrought.