An Act of Defiance

Everybody knows Nelson Mandela, but who knows the lawyer who saved him from the death penalty? "Bram Fischer" is a tribute to this lawyer.

The film portrays Fischer as man with great courage. After all he resists "Apartheid" in South Africa without, as a white man, belonging to the group of people that is discriminated by Apartheid. His resistence is motivated pure by idealism.

Furthermore Bram Fischer had something to lose. He belonged to the Sout African elite. His grandfather had been prime minister of the free state of Orange and the grandfather of his wife has been a general during the Boer war.

Of course his sympathies with the ANC brought Fischer in conflict with the government. When we learn what happend when his son died, when Fischer got ill himself and with his corpse when he was dead we realize that fact is stranger than fiction. A writer producing a scenario like that would be severly critized because of exaggerating.

I had never heard of Bram Fischer, but he is not completely forgotten, and rightly so.

Nelson Mandela said about him: "Fischer was one of the bravest and staunchest friends of the freedom struggle that I have ever known. From a prominent Afrikaner family, he gave up a life of privilege, rejected his heritage, and was ostracized by his own people, showing a level of courage and sacrifice that was in a class by itself"

In 2012 the city of Bloemfontein renamed its airport in Bram Fischer International Airport.

His Alma Mater in Oxford organizes a yearly lecture to commemorate Bram Fischer.