South African National Cinema examines how South African cinema represents national identities, especially with regard to race.
Jacqueline Maingard establishes interrelationships between South African cinema and key points in South Africa's history. She discusses how cinema figures in the making, entrenching and undoing of apartheid through detailed analyses of selected films, including De Voortrekkers (1916) at one end of the twentieth century and Mapantsula (1988) at the other, as well as films that have been produced post apartheid, including Drum (2004), Tsotsi (2005) and Zulu Love Letter (2004).