Cry, the Beloved Country (1995 film) Cry, the Beloved Country (1995 film) Cry, the Beloved Country is a 1995 South African-American drama film directed by Darrell Roodt, based on the novel "Cry, the Beloved Country" by Alan Paton. It stars James Earl Jones and Richard Harris. The film was made in 1995, shortly after the fall of apartheid and the free election of Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa. Set in South Africa in October 1946, before the implementation of apartheid, this is the story of church minister Steven Kumalo who is requested from his village to Johannesburg. There he discovers that his son Absolom
Beloved (novel) trade as a Holocaust-like genocide. Others, while concurring that "Beloved" is at times overwritten, have lauded the novel as a profound and extraordinary act of imagination. Noting the work's mythic dimensions and political focus, these commentators have treated the novel as an exploration of family, trauma, and the repression of memory as well as an attempt to restore the historical record and give voice to the collective memory of African Americans. Indeed, critics and Morrison herself have indicated that the controversial epigraph to "Beloved", "sixty million and more", is drawn from a number of studies on the African slave trade