It tells how a group of teenage conscripts are broken down by brutal military training before being sent to fight in Angola in 1981, where South Africa helped sustain a decades-long civil war fuelled by the Cold War.In the army, white men were taught to kill and defend the racist segregationist system, Hermanus said.
"White men are dangerous, white men are aggressive. Why is there that terror you sometimes feel around a group of white men? This film is questioning all that," he added. "Silence and repression of trauma permeates our society. We are having a huge conversation now about gender-based violence... about how men treat women."
Kai Luke Brummer, who plays the lead, a young conscript who falls for another soldier in the film's repressed gay love story, said it was"freaky and slightly traumatic", not least only hanging around with other white people."The abuse you got in the training felt like it seeped into your bones," Brummer told AFP.