Watching any one of the three - Juliette Binoche, Samuel L. Jackson, Brendan Gleeson - painting a wall would be a good use of time. Seeing them all in the same movie is a rare treat.Jackson (Pulp Fiction) is Langston Whitfield from the Washington Post, sent to monitor the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in South Africa. To avoid bloodshed, the commission asked white Afrikaners to appear before a public tribunal, confess exactly what they did, convince the commission they were acting under orders, make a believable apology, and amnesty will be given.Bonoche (The English Patient, Chocolat)is Anna Malan, a poet, who is doing daily broadcasts for the South African Broadcasting Company.Gleeson (In Bruges, Into the Storm, The Guard) is De Jager, a a South African cop with a zeal for torture and murder that went far beyond his job requirements; a reputed psychopath that is taking the fall for all the other criminals his superiors, in a new South Africa.Anna finds out things she really didn't want to know, and Whitfield finds that truth is not so black and white, as he believed.

Welcome to the New South Africa. The old order has fallen and the in-coming majority has decided to deal with the excesses of the old order genteelly through a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Anna Malan (Juliette Binoche) is one of the widely respected local reporters covering proceedings. And Anna is quite intent on celebrating South Africa's newly found freedom even though most other Afrikaaners either ignore the change-over or show polite disdain for Anna's exuberance. Anna is a bit too enthusiastic to take notice of the subtle expressions of displeasure.The scenes with Anna and her Afrikaneer family and friends are magnificently staged, capturing the tension of the moment and Anna's blithe ignorance of the discomfort of all around her.Anna is joined at the reporter's table by the American Langston Whitfield (Samuel L. Jackson) who finds great affection Afrikaaners and Africans have to their country very different from his ambivalent feelings toward his own. Yet while Whitfield is up to some serious work running a story on the notorious Colonel De Jager (Brendan Gleeson), does join the celebration.The excesses that the high priests of the old order have to publicly own up to range from the brutal and macabre to the plain bizarre. "I have only one question," an old man asks, "before I forgive you. Why did you chop down my fruit trees?" Most incidents are far more serious. Certainly the propensity of the unlawful violence and brutality was on a scale Bush and Cheney could only envy.The Commission, though it is exhuming bodies across the velt, cannot get a true grip on the organized violence of the former regime. Enter Colone De Jager. Though the Colonel reveals the secret torture camp, he is denied amnesty for having gone too far."Why," cries Anna after DeJager as he is being carted away, "did you do this?" The answer is as bizarre as the violence itself.The movie is highly recommended though the end is probably a little too arty for an American audience.

In conventional film making, producers think that political problems always have to be shown through a story. Mostly some kind of love story. The individual is always much more important than the masses, according to that liberal ideology.That's the problem with "Country on my Skull". The testimonies from the victims of apartheid come second to the story between the Africaan woman and the Afro-American man. That's violating what ought to be the main issue here.Samuel L Jackson and Juliette Binoche are both good, but their story is somewhat indescent and also typical for this kind of conventional film-making.

Director John Boorman has taken on a weighty and incendiary subject, much like Terry George's recent take on genocide in "Hotel Rwanda." Although "In My Country" is set post-Apartheid, it still covers a hot topic: what do you do with the people that are to blame when a genocide occurs? President Nelson Mandela formed a commission to get at the truth and in return for that information he was offering amnesty for those government officers that were only 'following orders'. An amazing precedent to say the least.However, director Boorman has chosen to balance the emotional testimony of the victims with a sometimes humorous side-story involving an American journalist, played by the great Samuel L. Jackson ("Coach Carter") and a local 'white' radio reporter, played by the equally great Juliette Binoche ("The English Patient").Certainly, a story of this import deserves a documentary but as it stands, this is as close as any American will ever get to this story since many newspapers buried it when it originally occurred. Racism is an ugly thing, but forgiveness is a beautiful thing and this movie balances the two in an effective and entertaining manner.Check this one out, especially if you are a fan of "Hotel Rwanda" and hearing the 'truth' for a change.