Scanialara You won't be disappointed!

CommentsXp Best movie ever!

Freeman This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Francene Odetta It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

chuckchuck21 Black Butterflies, a picture of the life of Ingrid Jonker (Carice van Houten) in South Africa during the years of Apartheid is a movie that leaves many impressions. She was a poet & the daughter of a South African MP or representative of an electoral district. Born to privilege, her mother died in an asylum she herself would later be admitted to herself. She showed signs of mental illness all her life & spent many of her days self medicating with sex & alcohol. Yet her talent with words is well documented in her poems.Being in conflict with her father's political beliefs she suffered an estrangement from him even when in the same room. It is well known that daughters who fail to receive the love they need from living fathers often turn to other men for love & approval. Sex, being the mechanism they try to use to obtain that that they lacked growing up, creating unstable relationships in their adult life too. They become a burden to those around them & not the first person you'd seek as a friend. Her choices as an adult leave a lot to be desired. Even her own daughter who she chose to leave motherless was used more as a crutch than an object of love & responsibility.She lived a life of mental turmoil in a country of extreme prejudice & hated that inequality. Unable to forget or assuage the pain of her circumstances, that pain grew over the years to choke her. Yet she became the voice of those that were declared less than human by her father's beliefs. A poem of hers was read at the first democratically elected South African Congress. It begins, "The child is not dead" She took her own life after having withstood all the pain & confusion she could in this life & that will always be controversial in this world. Who is to judge how a person that retains constant contact with mental agony so that it builds in them year by year with little or no relief is to be seen? We call those that overcome such circumstances heroes & hope we are like them. Yet those that see the inequities in this world & summarily reject such things for themselves while seeing them clear enough to describe them in verse, having those things enter their mind through their eyes on a daily basis, what can we say of them. Ingrid was a load to carry if you knew her & quite frankly I'm glad I didn't. I'm no fan of suicide either but I find more sorrow than condemnation in her passing. It is for certain that the people of a South Africa free of Apartheid see her as worthy of praise.Carice van Houten is excellent in portraying a life made of & lived by confusion. Rutger Hauer as her father & Liam Cunningham as her main love in life are strong in their roles as well. There is little in this movie that is shot as pretty or engaging scenery with the exception of the ocean. It's not intended to be pretty either in appearance or portrayal. Nudity is included but it is tastefully done. I was tempted to turn this off early on while they were displaying Ingrid's choices in life. It was a difficult watch to get through because of my dislike for her personality & life but I was glad I hung in till the end. I give it 4 out of 5 Amazon stars overall. 5 out of 5 for making me think through my reactions to it.It only rates 6.2 at IMDb but I think a lot of people quit on this one & rated it anyway.

Some Dude It would be extremely useful if IMDb were to actually mention this on the movie's page somewhere.If you are not from South Africa, you've probably never heard of this poetess from that Aparathied era. Unfortunately, this movie is unlikely to make you want to learn any more about her as it portrays her as an extremely unlikable, self-centred, promiscuous abuser of everyone she meets. I have no idea if this is actually how Jonker was in life, and quite frankly this movie makes me not care in the least.I'm sure she must have had some redeeming qualities, but the lacklustre performances and horrible script disguise them well.

p-stepien "Black Butterflies", a biographical drama imagining the life and times of famed Afrikaner poet Ingrid Jonker (played with a distracting non-afrikaans accent by Carice van Houten), ventures through uneasy territory of a manic-depressive egocentric leech, who happens per chance to also be a brilliant poet. Focused mainly around her tentative affair with acclaimed novelist Jack Cope (Liam Cunningham), it also features subplots regarding her promiscuous behaviour and romance with Eugene Maritz (Nicholas Pauling), de facto a cryptic Andre Brink, and her conflicted relationship with her father Abraham Jonker (Rutger Hauer), who headed the censorship department of the Apartheid government.Through her tribulations (without much trials) the audience in swept into the demented and self-absorbed world of the poet with destructive tendencies and little more than a fleeting regard for anything outside of her own virtual obsessions and hyperbolized melodrama. Director Paula van der Oest and scriptwriter Greg Latter leave little sympathy for Ingrid Jonker, portraying her as compulsive, impulsive, bordering on alcoholic, accusatory in nature, morally repugnant with overwhelming inclinations towards destroying everything around her during her turbulent emotional whirlwinds, including overwhelming contemptuous disregard towards her own child. Nonetheless Ingrid remains fascinating and magnetic as a poet epitomised by her internal contradictions and fragility. If this movie was aimed at being an elegy towards the revered writer, than sadly it has failed. But as a character study of a troubled and turbulent individual, which by teasing brilliance ends up spiralling into despair and manic annihilation, it is a captivating experience.Despite her obvious issues with keeping an accent and the resulting meandering articulation Carice van Houten still manages to convey the obsessive Ingrid with her crippling character disorders. Nonetheless, despite much more limited screen time, she is indiscriminately overshadowed by Liam Cunningham and Rutger Hauer, who come en force in their respective roles. Nonetheless, script-wise the interactions between father and daughter feel dauntlessly underlined, not following through on the key importance of this relationship to Jonker's writings. Filtered through some brilliant cinematography and restrained direction with a touch of poetic artistry, the overall experience was extremely enticing, even if the divisive character of Ingrid Jonker is bound to push all the wrong buttons for many viewers.

amalgam-3 A middle aged writer rescues a young woman from drowning near the shores of South Africa. Although he is much older, they fall in love right there and then and soon some obvious complications ensue. There is hardly a likable or interesting character in this wandering historical drama about the poet Ingrid Jonker (Carice van Houten). It deals primarily with the mentally troubled writer and her precarious relationships with men, including her father (Rutger Hauer) who is a member of the apartheid regime she strongly opposes. The film never picks up any speed and the absence of a discernible plot line or a compelling narrative makes for a very pallid viewing experience. Hauers script is particularly one-note but the same could be said of van Houten who seemed to be out of her depth in the role of a frustrated and depressed young woman trying to get her voice heard through rebellious poetry. Liam Cunningham fares a lot better as one of the two love interests and produces the only sympathetic character of the film.