This article contains spoilers.

On October 26, I found myself watching Jordan Peele’s acclaimed movie Get Out in the DPS office. Get Out explores racism and the position of Black people in America in its full horror. The director presents social issues in the American context, but the same systems of oppression extend to all corners of the map.

The film focuses on Chris, a young African-American who goes on a weekend getaway with Rose, his white girlfriend, to ultimately meet her parents. The strange behaviour of her parents becomes increasingly more nerve-wracking as the weekend progresses. The trip quickly turns from a simple getaway to a nightmare depicted in classic horror movie fashion.

The first recurring symbol in the film, and when I knew this movie would have me on the edge of my seat, was when the young couple hit a deer on the way to Rose’s family home. After hitting it, Chris exits the car to check the deer’s pulse. Upon touching it, a sort of energy transfer occurs.This transfer develops throughout the film as Chris encounters repeated references to deers. For instance, in the very first exchange between Chris and Rose’s father, her father states a desire to kill all deer, drawing a parallel for the audience to white supremacist feelings towards people of colour.

The movie touches on the internalization of white supremacy happening in America by representing white supremacy as a process of brainwashing and seeking to assimilate racialized bodies. Get Out ties its story to America through colours. Indeed, the American flag is repeatedly evoked by the prevalence of blue, white and red elements.  The red, white, and blue lighting and colour grading never allows the audience to forget North America’s historical, institutionalized systems of slavery, colonialism, racism, and exclusion.

In the second part of the movie, we are introduced to the ‘sunken place.’ In a pivotal scene there, Rose’s mother forces Chris to blend into the darkness of the sunken place after hypnotizing him. I see the sunken place as present day America. It’s a feeling. It’s where some people are born. It’s a place where I, as a young Black woman with American citizenship, am taken whenever I leave my home. In the film, the sunken place is a place that light does not touch. The sunken place represents the loneliness white supremacy seeks to enforce on people of colour, trying to weaken communities and resistance. Jordan Peele achieves his goal of showing a “suspended animation of how we look at race in America” through use of bold imagery and resonant music. With no control over oneself, one is left lost in a world where they do not feel welcome.

This feeling of loneliness and a lack of community or help around oneself intensifies as the end unfolds. After a bloody fight for his life, Chris escapes the burning estate only to hear a police car approaching. If he were a white character, Chris would expect to feel a sense of safety upon hearing sirens from a cop car. Given the film’s point of view from a Black man, which emphasizes the micro-aggressions against Chris that create an unsettling atmosphere targeting his Blackness, the audience does not feel safe when the police show up. In fact, the sirens evoke  the images of police officers killing Black people point-blank, images that audiences see regularly in the news.

Jordan Peele’s use of horror operates as a successful critique of the genre. Horror movies have tend to feature fictional futures or monsters, but Get Out proves already horrific enough. By telling his story within the horror genre, Peele sheds light on the terror of racism in a fresh way for the usual spectator. Because the film talks about topics of slavery and white ownership of Black bodies through an ingenious subversion of the horror genre, it truly deserves a 100% rating.

This is why I watched this film four times. It reveals the terror of racism.

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The opening film, Kalushi: the Story of Solomon Mahlangu, is based on the true story of the nineteen-year old hero Solomon Mahlangu. From his humble community in Mamelodi, South Africa to his execution by the state in 1976, this narrative feature film touches on the treatment of Black men in South Africa and their loss of individualism. Mahlangu’s decision to join the liberation movement results from an incident in which he was brutally beaten by the police. On top of a physical beating, spectators also witness  emotional humiliation as the police officer pees on Solomon’s beaten body. The camerawork makes the act seem almost casual – it didn’t do any sensationalist close-up, that would’ve proven unnecessary. For this reason, the scene holds a heavy weight as it represents the condition of Black people in South Africa. The scene vividly depicts disgusting and base treatment of the Black body, to the extent that the audience (from the individual spectator to the rest of the population in South Africa) is desensitized. It is just another day, not much different from another.

Following the bloodshed of the 1976 Soweto uprisings, that saw black school children in South Africa protesting the introduction of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in local schools, Solomon began rigorous military training with a rebellion regime. After his friend Mondy shoots two innocent white men in Johannesburg, Solomon stands trial under the common purpose doctrine which essentially says that Mondy’s crime is equally his own. The unfairness of this law is obvious as Solomon faces punishment for another Black man’s crime while corruption freely runs throughout the law force. Even Solomon’s older brother, an officer, experiences police brutality when other policemen question him.

The state ultimately demands death by hanging as punishment, and the film ends with one more battle cry from Solomon, a hero of the rebellion. This is not a cry of hope but rather a cry of constant, demanding efforts. It is through this persistence that battles against injustice are won.

Joseph Oesi, in his film Black Lives Matter, highlights the exploitation of South Africa’s greatest resource – its minerals. This documentary draws in the audience as it bluntly explains the struggle between the owners of the land and foreign exploitation and indulgence.

Corruption and a hunger for wealth soon followed after South Africa’s African National Congress came to power. What people hoped would be an end to inequality turned into a deeper dive into exploitation. These political and social inequalities demanded attention, particularly after 34 mineworkers were massacred at Marinkana. The ease with which these workers were killed is unsettling. In response to demanding a livable wage, they were forcefully silenced. The movie displays the exploitation of native people in all of its horror. The workers make only 10 USD a day, making their working condition close to slavery; yet, international mining companies have a net worth in the billions. I continue to be shocked at the greed of predominantly white countries.

The quote “Africa feeds the world but the world eats without Africa” came to mind halfway through the film. Capitalist interest takes the food out of the mouths of native communities without remorse. Unofficial contracts are made between mining companies and traditional leaders whose legitimacy is questioned. Community Chiefs are arbitrarily chosen without evidence of their lineage. Mining companies place these pawns in communities to facilitate their  guise of working amicably with the populations near the mining sites. Naturally, foreign companies, all at the cost of their brethren, pay these false chiefs a hefty stipend each month. Tension exists three ways between mineworkers, mining companies, and traditional leaders in Mokopane.

The audience is introduced to three rural communities: the Mogales, the Kekanas, and the Mapelas, all who are facing pressure from foreign companies. The latter stood out as one of the inhabitants who courageously challenged the companies was a young woman. She stressed that the land that she is on is her birthright, it was passed down from generation to generation, as her community lived and died. There are ancestral gravesites that face the danger of being desecrated as mining companies infringe on the area to exploit its resources and peoples. It becomes clear that, at the expense of the country and through the division of  local communities, a small elite holds wine glasses that overflow with the blood of a nation.

While the documentary felt overextended in some areas, it succeeded in exploring how South Africa’s resources and inhabitants are exploited by a powerful elite.The unethical and forcible mining of a major resource strips the power of the majority of the South African population. No other place in the world has such a bountiful quantity of platinum and other minerals, and still it stands that South Africans are prevented from keeping their wealth or enjoy the fruits of their labour by neocolonial greed and exploitation.

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