Commentary: Black Butterflies

On Saturday evening this beautiful film debuted at the TriBeCa film festival. An homage to the life of the South African poetess, Ingrid Jonker, the movie began with her childhood and chronicled the ups and downs of her quixotic life until her tragic end. Like her poems, each shot of the movie shone like a gorgeous realization frozen in time.  Moments captured in vignettes and filmic visions contributed to development of Ingrid’s character. Mercurial, passionate, and capricious, she held steady to nothing but her poetry, her daughter, and the one man she loved. Occasionally she let down her daughter and her lover, but never her work. Within her poetry, she captured the struggles of apartheid South Africa and communicated them with visceral human emotion and monumental imagery. Black Butterflies in all its cinematographic beauty, drags on a bit too long. As one viewer commented at the movie’s conclusion, “it seemed she died several times”. This assessment is apt. Ingrid’s multiple “deaths” captured her manic – depressive tendencies and outlined her periods of rise and decline, but could have been dealt with in a more concise manner. Nevertheless, watching her gain inspiration, write, love, and fall apart, over and over, successfully communicated her struggles and the influence of this tortured woman’s incendiary work on South Africa’s literary development and post-apartheid epoch.