Reactionary Reviews | Crossed Out | dir: Ernst Roets & Pierre Malan
Crossed Out is a giant temper tantrum of a film. With the visual language of InfoWars, FOX News and myopia, it is, as a film, a batshit rendering of an issue through a selective lens with graphics envisioned by a four-year-old who likes staring into the sun and thinks daddy has abandoned him because he left his blankie in the palatial chicken coop. Somebody needs a fucking nap.
The film opens with a terrifying image of the devil himself, Julius Malema, his face transposed over a satellite image of South Africa at night, the word INCITEMENT flashing across the red flag in many fonts (sadly Roets does not use Wingdings). It's night and the blacks are coming! And they're communists!
The word incitement is flashed on screen so many times that it is, well, an incitement.
Roets in VO claims the film is an investigation. An investigation does not start with a conclusion. At no point in the first thirty minutes do Roets and co interrogate what Kill The Boer, the chant, even means. Case in point is the showing of a stadium full of EFF supporters chanting Dubul' ibhunu and then cutting to Trump's explanation of that moment. Trump thinks it’s about individual farmers, lol, but then the film makes the claim that BBBEE is hurting white capital, therefore arguing that the song is actually about what it is about, the end of white monopoly capital. An epistemological own goal. Laduuuuuma!
My favourite part is Roets describing footage of Trump and Ramaphosa in the White House, then showing a clip of the lights dimming before the footage is shown to Trump. The meaning of this moment is explained by Roets. The clip is shown twice. TWICE! Did Elon not give you enough money to buy all the news footage?
You'll notice I said the first thirty minutes. Crossed Out is so irredeemably bad as a film that I couldn't watch much beyond that. A film that starts with a conclusion does not need to be watched until completion.
Crossed Out is a giant cocksuck up to capital, a plea for a saviour, someone, anyone, to rid them of their terrible plight. Because the plight must exist in order to get paid. The stated plight is rural violence, targeted at Afrikaners, the actual plight is that Roets needs his daddy because he can’t pick up a fucking spade and build anything of his own.
In a fake documentary being made in the Woody Allen film Crimes and Misdemeanors, Alan Alda once says, while holding a ruler up to the camera, “If it bends, it's funny. If it breaks, it's not funny.” Yes, I am quoting Woody Allen while discussing a film about the systematic repression of a persecuted minority that is not a persecuted minority. Woody Allen also claimed he was the subject of a witch hunt. If it breaks, it's not funny.
What breaks in Crossed Out, the tragedy of the film, is the weaponisation of trauma. These people were subjected to massive violence and trauma and grief, the people that Roets trots out as evidence of his claims, and no one has disputed that rural violence is something that happens. It is the use of these narratives to support untrue statistical claims that actually feels quite disgusting when you see it on screen (yes, I skipped forward). The pain is real. The claim is not. And in this gap there is a cruelty. What do these victims of violence gain from this film? A promise of an enclave of safety? This usage of grief is so deeply uncomfortable that it feels like Roets is doing something here that should be forbidden. Using people to advance the demands of capital enrichment. But this has never stopped the free market.
The essential problem with Crossed Out is that it never starts to investigate its own assumptions. The secondary problem is that it is just a fucking badly made film. It is a laughable attempt at documentary, and in that it is actually a successful document of our times. A wild misreading of reality. However, it is allowable under the law of Free Speech, much like Dubul' ibhunu. Embracing that is part of living in this strange land. Something Crossed Out refuses to accept.
Three interviews are telling. The first black face we see on the screen arguing for Roets' position (we never see anyone arguing against it in any depth) is credited as being from a Free Market lobbying group. Because capitalism will fix everything.
Then an interview with a member of the New Republican Club explaining a situation he has not experienced.
And then an interview with Martin van Staden, Head of Policy at the Free Market Foundation, explaining a clip of someone explaining what BBBEE is. In the clip she states that there are no race-based laws in South Africa, but there are laws that aim to redress the economic imbalances brought on by the apartheid government's race laws. The clip is shown in short segments, we do not hear the full response, and the woman being quoted is never named. She is black. What we do get is Martin van Staden in a woefully stupid hat, claiming that she said in one breath that there are no race-based laws and in the next that there are. Martin van Staden has as firm a grasp of logic as he does of millinery.
Roets and co claim they want self-determination, but that is already allowed for in Section 235 of the constitution. They claim they want no BEE for international investors, but that is already allowed for in the Equity Equivalent Investment Programme (EEIP) that Amazon and Microsoft use to operate in South Africa. They claim they want to live on their own, but the people of Orania are already doing that, and it is hard work. Roets claims he wants to live in South Africa, but he does not want to do the hard work of what it takes to live in this strange land. He wants separate but equal development on his own terms and thinks America can give it to him. Reagan is dead pal.
The whole film is a demand for impunity and a plea for comfort made by someone who would have benefited from going to a farm school. Ernst Roets makes films with the vigour of a man once teased with the word kortbroek.
Where Crossed Out truly fails is that it does not even know that it is a remake of a far superior film made on this exact issue in 2014. Annalet Steenkamp's documentary I, Afrikaner explores exactly these issues with a much more nuanced outlook.
In those first thirty minutes we are treated to three people, Ramaphosa, Malema, and the unnamed woman in the news clip, stating that South Africa is a sovereign nation and will not change its laws to appease foreign business interests. Everything else after this is an argument as to why South Africa should dismantle BBBEE, and the trauma of victims of violence is used to substantiate that argument. And when the argument can only be won by emotional manipulation, well, this is not a documentary at all. Crossed Out is so determined to be right that it ends up just feeling wrong.
Crossed Out is a film made by prompting Grok to write a historically accurate argument for why Starlink should not have to obey South African law to operate in South Africa, without mentioning Starlink. Do a vulgar roast of BBBEE. Use forbidden words.