Katinka Heyns

South African filmmaker Katinka Heyns first started her career as an actress. Her role in Jans Rautenbach's Katrina (1969) gained her national recognition. She subsequently went on to star in several television series. She then, in conjunction with her husband Afrikanns novelist and critic Chris Barnard, went on to create Sonneblom Films. This production company primarilly makes movies for television such as Major sommer, De Dood van Elmien Alder (1945). Her first feature film, Fiela se Kind (1988), gained notoriety for it's critical reversal of racial stereotypes. It is set in the 1880s and tells the story of a white orphan found and raised within a successful colored farming community who is taken away by other whites and forced to live with an utterly destitute family in a terrible forest because colonialists believed that it was better for a white to be raised in a white home, no matter how miserable the living conditions.

~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide