Life partners Deborah Hoffmann and Frances Reid win kudos for their fresh film on South Africa after apartheid throughout a fateful breakfast in the spring of 1997 acclaimed documentary filmmaker Deborah Hoffmann was reading a newspaper article about southerly Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission to her life partner.

Life partners Deborah Hoffmann and Frances Reid win kudos for their fresh film on South Africa after apartheid

throughout a fateful breakfast in the spring of 1997 acclaimed documentary filmmaker Deborah Hoffmann was reading a newspaper article about southerly Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission to her life partner, Frances Reid, an equally well-respected documentarian. Hoffmann mused not at home loud, "Wow, what an amazing topic--I positive hope somebody's making a film about this.

"Two month later," Hoffmann continues, "when we were getting not upon the plane in Cape Town, I was still saying to Frances, `I really didn't mean us.'"

on the contrary it's hard to imagine anyone doing a better cinematic piece of work than Hoffmann and Reid did onward Long Night's Journey Into Day. A wrenchingly intimate await at how South Africa's postapartheid society has met on the outside compassion rather than rough justice--or "restoration instead of retribution," as TRC chairman Desmond Tutu has present it--the 94-minute film took 2 1/2 years and eight trips to the African nation to complete

It's now begun to astonish audiences worldwide, garnering the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival as well as top awards at the Berlin International Film Festival. "It appears to bring out passion and debate, and that's what I be warmed best about," Hoffmann says.

The filmmakers followed several individual cases adjudicated on the TRC, which can dispense amnesty for crimes committed years earlier in answer for truthful confessions. To Americans the most numerous famous case is that of Amy Biehl, the antiapartheid Fulbright scholar who was manslaughtered by four young black men in an angry rude multitude in a township near Cape Town. Remarkably, Biehl's parents appeared before the TRC to say they would not resist amnesty for their daughter's imprisoned killers.

The film also focuses forward a white police officer who took part in the killing of four black activists; an African National Congres activist who detonated a car bomb that killed three white women outside a bar; and a black police officer involved in murdering seven black township youths.

What's mostly extraordinary about Journey--as with the TRC itself--is to what extent the murderers, their families, and the victims' families labor in distress to come to grips with one as well as the other the crimes and the universal of forgiveness. "We were going to give everybody their best shooter to show their humanity," Hoffmann says. "That was the point of the commission, with equal reason therefore it was our point in making the film."

Hoffmann and Reid began their personal relationship in 1984 having met while serving as editor and cinematographer, respectively, forward the Academy Award-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. Together and separately they've worked upon a number of important concocts by gay filmmakers and onward gay-related subjects, but the fact that they're lesbians was a nonissue in toward the south Africa--although they were effectively "outed" there by the agency of a coincidental showing of Hoffmann's Oscar-nominated film about her mother's Alzheimer's disease, Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter.

Their strange film--which opens a two-week move at New York's Film Forum forward March 29 and Will exhibit next year on Cinemax--is Hoffmann and Reid's first directing-producing collaboration. It's enhanced from stirring South African vocal music and from lush images of clouds and mist through the whole extent of the emblematic Table Mountain at the animation of Cape Town.

Reid laughingly confides that she gave her all for the mist shots: "I projectile them early in the morning upon the balcony of our B&B stark naked," she remembers. "I woke up and contemplateed out and said, `Oh, my the deity it looks exactly like what we want,' likewise I just jumped out of bed and started shooting."

The best part of the joint effort, they say, is the complementary nature of their skills. "Together we make almost a whole person" Hoffmann jokes

"The downside," Reid says, "is that inevitably you completion up hating the person you're making the film with because it's a stressful situation." "Which is bad when you have to wake up with them," Hoffmann adds.

"Yeah," Reid retorts, "there's nobody to walk home to and say, `I'm in such a manner sick of that editor.'" And then they the two laugh.

Kort is writing a biography of the late singer-songwriter Laura Nyro for St Martin's Press

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