Black Butterflies

In a seaside shack, Ingrid and her sister Anna watch their elderly grandmother stop breathing. A hearse carries her body away and the family is shaken. Abraham Jonker, a politician, arrives and bluntly asserts his authority, telling Ingrid to call him Pa.

Decades later, in 1960, Ingrid is swept under by the sea and saved by a man on the shore who introduces himself as novelist Jack Cope. He tells her he is the author whose work helped her survive, and she realizes he is the poet she admires. The encounter confirms her identity as Ingrid Jonker.

Ingrid's estranged husband Pieter asks for another chance, but she rejects him. Jack invites Ingrid to a party with his bohemian literary circle, and she chooses to attend rather than stay with Pieter. The social milieu introduces her to a world of dissenting writers.

At the party and on the way to Nyanga with a black writer, Ingrid learns that censorship is a daily reality for dissident artists. The writer laments the ban and confiscation of his manuscript, and he reveals that Abraham Jonker chairs the Censorship Board.

In a private moment in Jack's flat, Ingrid reads a poem she wrote in his honor and they connect deeply. Their relationship turns romantic as they share passion and intellectual kinship amid the political turmoil around them.

Jack declares his love and asks Ingrid to move in with him. She agrees, but Jack refuses to marry. He tells her he needs time to finish his novel, and he plans to leave for two or three months, prompting Ingrid to accompany him or see him off at the train.

Ingrid undergoes a secret abortion, a private and painful decision she keeps from Jack. The act compounds her emotional strain as their relationship strains under distance and doubt.

Out of loneliness, Ingrid seduces fellow writer Eugene Maritz. When Jack returns, he finds Maritz's shoes in his closet and impulsively kicks Ingrid out of his life.

The police shoot at a car and kill a black child, a brutal event that steels Ingrid's resolve to speak truth to power. She goes on to write Die Kind, a poem portraying the child as a martyr and foreshadowing apartheid's end.

Ingrid asks her father to read Die Kind; Abraham reads only part of it and rips it up, showing his tyranny and rejection of her dissent. The moment deepens her alienation from her family and intensifies her depressive symptoms.

Depression takes hold and Ingrid is committed to Valkenberg Hospital. Jack visits and learns about Ingrid's secret abortion. He finds a pocketbook of poems which he and Uys Krige compile into the poetry book Rook an Ochre, published with Ingrid's dedication to Jack and Uys.

After a European trip that strains their relationship, Ingrid undergoes another abortion in Paris and electroconvulsive therapy with her father's permission. She returns to Cape Town unable to write or smile, then gives Jack a token of devotion before walking into the sea and ending her life. The film closes with Mandela reading the translated Die Kind against the sea.