Directed and filmed by Charlie Northcott and co-directed and produced by Isa-Lee Jacobson, The Apartheid Killer is a truly remarkable documentary. By focusing on the life of one man, a mass killer, and the lives of some of his victims and their families, it speaks eloquently about the inhuman racism, commonplace violence and lasting trauma of apartheid.
Jacobson's dogged pursuit of this story, over more than twenty years, has enabled a critical balance between emotional engagement and dispassionate clarity. Empathy, not only for Van Schoor's victims and their relatives, but even for the killer himself - in the sense of an attempt to understand, to give him an opportunity to acknowledge the terrible nature of what he has done - gives even greater power to the storytelling.
Curiously, Van Schoor comes across as neither evil nor a psychopath, not stupid either, merely as an entirely unthinking, unreflecting product of the society that made him - of apartheid. On the East London seafront, he meets a Black man who asks his name because he thinks he recognises him. The killer gives his name only as Van Schoor, suggesting that the man can do his own 'research'. Later, when asked, by the film-makers, how he wants to be remembered, he says: 'As Louis van Schoor', giving his full name, as 'a peaceful, loving, caring person'. The difference between the two encounters appears to be the faintest recognition on his part that he has done anything wrong.
Through his own words, Van Schoor betrays himself, referring to Black South Africans as the 'opposite' race; he describes how he would creep up, barefoot, on his victims, in response to silent alarms before using 'maximum force'. 'Why?' Jacobson asks him at one point; his job was not to kill. One of his victims was twelve years old. Van Schoor also refers to his 'reign', to 'hunting a different species' then, finally, post-apartheid, to how 'Blacks are going to become part of society'.
But there is a thread of resilience, hope and slow healing that runs through the whole film, giving it real force. The sister of one of Van Schoor's victims, Edward Soenies, speaks to her dead brother by his graveside: "I can feel you through the wind."
When Jacobson finally confronts Van Schoor to tell him that, whatever the courts may have decided with regard to 'justifiable homicide' or anything else, he is a serial killer, he responds, 'My dear, trying for sensation . . .' and tells her that she is 'stepping over the line'. Along with his complete lack of shame, guilt or remorse, Van Schoor's self-pitying view of himself as a scapegoat is a telling counterpoint to the words, memories and evident strength of his victims' families. When Edward Soenies has been disinterred from his unmarked grave and returned to his family to be buried where he lived, his sister says that Van Schoor has taken nothing from them, that 'Edward has come home.'
Jacobson and Northcott have done a near immaculate job in using one powerfully shocking story to shine a very necessary light on a past which has not yet passed. This is a brilliant piece of film-making, quietly compelling as it reveals the full extent of the inhumanity and violence that defined apartheid. The film-makers have played a significant part in exorcising one small, but telling, part of a terrible history.
As Soenies's sister says right at the end, 'He's nothing, Van Schoor. He's just like apartheid. He's a ghost of the past.'
