In this wonderful new documentary by local filmmaker Rod Freedman (Uncle Chatzkel), Sidney Bloch, an internationally recognized professor of psychiatry, loving father, communal stalwart and author, returns to South Africa for his medical school reunion, determined to resolve feelings that have troubled him for more than forty years. He is accompanied by his teenage son, Aaron, who turns out to be his father's harshest critic. Growing up in Apartheid South Africa, Sid abhorred the system but did almost nothing to oppose it, or the ruling Afrikaners, whom he regarded as the enemy, akin to the Nazis. He then fled to Israel the day after his medical graduation. A sense of guilt and shame accompanied him throughout his later move to Australia. How does a man who lost fourteen relatives in the Holocaust come to behave in this way? Within this deceptively simple framework, Freedman addresses a myriad of troubling questions, as Sid journeys back to Cape Town to seek forgiveness. Along the way, Freedman gives us an absorbing and energetic sketch of present-day South Africa in which he seeks out victims of Apartheid, and Sid's former colleagues who stayed to make a difference and current political activists.
To be introduced by Rod Freedman, with a Q & A session to follow the screening