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The story of Sandra Laing was all over the South African newspapers. It begins in Cape Town in 1965. Sandra was the daughter of white Afrikaners, the descendants of Dutch settlers. There was no question that they were her parents. Yet Sandra was not white. Her parents were proud of her, protected her. Sandra was a bright child. But when the parents enrolled her in school, there was trouble: the other parents wanted to prevent their white children from being taught together with a black girl. In the face of the insane apartheid regime, no one wanted to believe that wise parents could have a black child. The parents reassured them. Of course Sandra is white. Now you can slowly find your way around the world of Skin: The parents run a small local store. Sannie Laing (Alice Krige) is always friendly to the customers. Her husband Abraham (Sam Neill) cautions her not to be too nice. Customers are to be served, not adopted. Liberal Abraham is not; he reacts indignantly to any suggestion of "black" blood in his family. But Sandra obviously does not look "white." Abraham fights his way to the supreme court. He wants to have his daughter classified as "white". A geneticist explains that many South Africans do not have "white" in their blood. A sensitive issue in South Africa. A country where the so-called pencil test is used to determine whether one is "white." If the pencil falls out of the hair - positive. If it gets stuck, it can only be "black" hair. In such an environment, the cheerful child Sandra (Sophie Okonedo) becomes a disturbed teenager. The parents arrange disastrous dates with white teenagers. Sandra, however, falls in love with the black gardener, whom her father chases away with a rifle. Officially, it is considered a crime in the apartheid regime for a white woman to date a black man. And wasn't Sandra white? Pregnant, she runs away from home... The real story behind this took place until the 70s. Apparently, it fascinated South Africans! A cut in the fiction that the races were separate and could never meet. The Dutch, however, landed in Cape Town 400 years earlier and Sandra may be considered living proof that the races did meet. Seemingly effortlessly, Sophie Okonedo here embodies the youthful Sandra into young adulthood. She chimed in on this society where race dictated who you could love, where you lived, what you worked or studied. Society defined who you were. The greatest scene: Sandra is finally to receive her white card, but demands a black one. Her very existence is no longer based on a piece of paper! Skin tells all this through the eyes of a happy girl who becomes an outsider. Not a predictable story, even if I reveal that Skin begins when Nelson Mandela is appointed president. It's also the day a television crew corners Sandra. She answers their questions only briefly, "It comes too late for me."