E59 | Silverton Siege ( Film)

<p>Think of the thriller <strong>“Silverton Siege”</strong> as a South African “Dog Day Afternoon” — a hostage situation, a bank surrounded and a tense stand-off with potent political implications.</p><p>Director Mandla Dube and a superb cast deliver a tight and tense true story that hews to genre formula because that’s what hostage thrillers all do. There are just a couple of ways this all ends, after all.</p><p>But stars<strong> Thabo Ramatesi, Noxolo Dlamini</strong> and<strong> Stefan Erasmus </strong>animate a wildly-improvised 1980 day of political terrorism, designed to “make this country ungovernable,” tumbling into Plan C after Plan A is aborted and Plan B — their escape — is foiled. And with his first produced screenplay, Sabelo Mgidi makes a wry, raw comment on the delusions of “racial purity” at a moment when Apartheid finally started to crack.</p><p>Four “freedom fighters” were set to blow up the tanks at a huge fuel storage facility. But cagey, experienced Calvin Khumalo (Rametesi) smells a trap just before it springs. They escape in their van, only to be chased all over Pretoria, losing one of their number in the process.</p><p>Captain Langerman (veteran South African heavy <strong>Arnold Vosloo</strong>) has them cornered, at last. That’s when they storm into a bank, take its diverse population of racially segregated customers hostage, and try to bargain their way out.</p><p>Things get really interesting when their negotiated escape goes wrong, and Khumalo decides that whatever transpires, this just became bigger than these three and their hostages.</p><p>“What’s the price of freedom? EVERYTHING.”</p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p>The “true story” angle immunizes the picture — somewhat — from any tendency to mutter “Oh come on!” Some of the sermonizing you have to figure was invented, the “non violence” ethos declared by the freedom fighters sanitizes them and as character names were changed, other elements aren’t the literal truth.</p><p>There’s an African American boxing promoter (<strong>Sha