Catch a Fire’ is incendiary
Noyce creates a vivid, riveting story that resonates with today’s politics
REVIEW
By John Hartl
Film critic
MSNBC
Updated: 9:56 p.m. CT Oct 25, 2006
A form of waterboarding is approved for government use. Prisoners are held indefinitely. A tortured prisoner dies of a “weak heart.” His friend, whose wife is tortured too, is so appalled that he joins a resistance movement.
That’s the fact-based plot of the riveting new drama, “Catch a Fire.” But the movie is not set in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay. It takes place in South Africa in the 1980s, during the end of the apartheid years, around the same time then-Congressman Dick Cheney was voting against the release of Nelson Mandela and the recognition of the African National Congress.
It’s the story of one of Mandela’s prisonmates, Patrick Chamusso, who was brutalized and suspected of terrorism long before he joined the resistance. The early scenes dramatize the daily humiliations inflicted on black men who didn’t want to be “Uncle Toms” but are too frightened to fight back.
After a terrorist bombing at the Secunda oil refinery, Chamusso is picked up by the police, who are less effective with physical torture than they are at threatening his family. Eventually he tells them a story he thinks they want to hear.
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