On Demand Weekly

On Demand Weekly provides new movie reviews of hot movies on demand from the POV of watching from the comfort of your home. Today’s review: BLACK BUTTEFLIES (Tribeca Film).

BLACK BUTTERFLIES
The soul-piercing voice of a generation, of a people…Ingrid Jonker
By Cynthia Kane

She’s known widely in South Africa, but elsewhere, I’m just not sure. The South Africans refer to her as their “Sylvia Plath”, but her words speak more fully of the human experience, of injustice and touch on the social and political. Not only will BLACK BUTTERLIES attract an art-house audience and perhaps wider – particularly women and a smart crowd who just likes a good story – it may also introduce this poet’s work to a new audience outside her native land.

BLACK BUTTERFLIES (Tribeca Film)

To call Ingrid Jonker, the “South African Sylvia Plath” just doesn’t make sense, except they were both women, extraordinary poets, emotionally charged and both died well before their time. I don’t know if Jonker was depressed or mentally ill; this film seems to indicate the circumstances of her life played a huge part in her chaotic behavior, her enormous sensual appetites, her desire to live life fully, her need to attack injustices via her words. Is she so different than any other artist who’s politically, emotionally charged? Was it the times in which she lived that puts that judgment of mental instability on her? Was she unhinged or was her society, this Apartheid-era South Africa the element of actual insanity, and not the woman here?

In reality Jonker was far more political, her poems attacking the ugly, racist society she lived in. a nice but maybe not necessary moment at end, includes we hear Nelson Mandela reading her most famous work, "The child (who was shot dead by soldiers at Nyanga)". It would have been less cliché to choose another way of demonstrating her continued popularity in post-Apartheid South Africa; Nelson Mandela does not have to be part of every South African film that comes out internationally.