Also known as The Boers at the End of the World, this SAFTA Award-winning documentary tells the extraordinary tale of a generation of Afrikaans speakers who somehow ended up in Argentina.
More than a century ago, after the Anglo Boer War, a group of Afrikaners fled South Africa. The story goes that back in the early 1900s, Argentina started coveting immigrants, luring them with the promise of land. The only problem is that the land they were given wasn’t exactly ideal for farming. The groups of Afrikaners settled on Patagonia’s east coast – a desolate landscape not too dissimilar to the Karoo. The Argentinian government at the time, under General Julio A Roca, offered up the land, hoping the hardy Afrikaners would be able to make something of it.
They arrived to no houses, infrastructure or drinking water. While many returned with whatever the 1900s equivalent of fok die kak was, a few remained.
This documentary tells their story. It’s a bizarre time warp with an almost unrecognisable dialect of Afrikaans being spoken, a combination of speaking it with a Spanish accent and not having been around for the language’s evolution.
The featured families try desperately to cling on to whatever traditions they believe truly represents being an Afrikaner, but as they learn with their “homecoming”, those notions are far from reality.
