Synopsis
The year is 1965, and 10 year-old Sandra and her parents, Abraham and Sannie, are white Afrikaners. They are shopkeepers in a remote area of the Eastern Transvaal and, despite Sandra's mixed-race appearance, have lovingly brought her up as their white little girl. Sandra is sent to a boarding school in the neighbouring town of Piet Retief, where her (white) brother Leon is also studying, but parents and teachers complain that she does not belong. She is examined by State officials, reclassified as coloured, and expelled from the school. Sandra's parents are shocked, but Abraham fights through the courts to have the classification reversed. The story becomes an international scandal and media pressure forces the law to change, so that Sandra becomes officially white again.
By the time she is 17, Sandra realises she is never going to be accepted by the white community. She falls in love with Petrus, a black man and the local vegetable seller, and begins an illicit love affair. Abraham threatens to shoot Petrus and disown Sandra. Sannie is torn between her husband's rage and her daughter's predicament. Sandra elopes with Petrus to Swaziland. Abraham alerts the police, and has them arrested and put in prison for the illegal border crossing. Sandra is released by the local magistrate to return home with her parents, but she instead decides to return to Petrus, prompting her father to disown her.
Now Sandra must live her life as a coloured woman in South Africa for the first time, with no running water, no sanitation and little income. Although she feels more at home in this community, she desperately misses her parents and yearns for a reunion. She and her mother make attempts to communicate, but are consistently thwarted by Sandra's father. Late in his life, when he is too sick to act on his own, he reconsiders and asks his wife to take him to visit Sandra. Sandra's mother, angry that his newfound guilt had surfaced only after he had for 10 years stubbornly ignored her own emotional torment and longing for a reunion, refuses his request and says that neither of them deserves Sandra's forgiveness.
Eventually, Sandra's marriage to Petrus deteriorates and she leaves him, taking their two children with her, when he becomes physically abusive. She looks for her parents at that time, but finds they had since moved from her childhood home. Not knowing where they are, she continues on with her life, raising her children by herself. When the county's apartheid government comes to an end, there is renewed media interest in her story. Sandra's mother sees Sandra interviewed on television and writes to her to inform her of her father's death two years earlier. The letter provides no return address nor any other clue as to Sannie's whereabouts, but receiving it prompts Sandra to renew her search. Eventually, she finds her mother residing in a nursing home and the two are happily reunited.
An epilogue informs the viewer that Sandra's mother died in 2001, while her two brothers continue to refuse to see her.
Read more about this topic: Skin (2008 Film)