A South African apartheid true-story drama about Sandra Laing, an African child born in the 1950s to Afrikaners, unaware of their black ancestry. Her parents (Sam Neill and Alice Krige) are rural shopkeepers who lovingly bring her up as their ‘white’daughter.
Sandra is sent to a boarding school in the neighbouring town of Piet Retief, where her (white) brother Leon is also studying, but parents and teachers complain that she doesn’t belong. She is examined by State officials, reclassified as ‘coloured’, and expelled from the school. Her parents fight through the courts to have the classification reversed and the story becomes an international scandal. Thus begins Sandra's thirty-year journey from rejection to acceptance.