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Documenting the trauma of apartheid: Long Night's Journey into Day and South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission
How has the documentary evolved as filmmakers grapple with the complex projects of truth telling and nation building in post-apartheid South Africa? If the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has become an internationally renowned instance of conflict resolution, recent documentary accounts suggest that the nationally televised hearings laid bare enduring wounds in the body politic just as much as they healed such wounds. While media coverage of the TRC sessions often folded these social tensions into a celebratory model of national unity, accounts of the process attentive to the suffering of victims tend to unsettle such unificatory discourses, in the process disrupting conventional narrative form. Through a discussion of Frances Reid and Deborah Hoffmann's Long Night's Journey Into Day: South Africa's Search for Truth and Reconciliation, this article challenges tightly compartmentalized typologies of documentary films, arguing instead for an awareness of the narrative complexity and irresolution embedded within even ostensibly orthodox modes of documentary. Through its dialectical narrative account of the TRC, Long Night's Journey Into Day creates a searing account of the lacunae in South Africa's celebrated transition to democracy.