One of the most convincing historical analogies for Israel’s occupation of Palestine has been South Africa’s Apartheid system, which of course eventually ceased with the country’s first free elections in 1994, won by Nelson Mandela’s ANC. Still, cinematic depictions of Apartheid and its afterlife have understandably been few, or under-distributed, in recent years, as global interest in South African politics has subsided with the country’s quieter international profile. In this climate, John Trengove’s new, Afrikaans-language film The Smell of Apples, which has premiered in Toronto’s Platform competition, faces a challenging journey to be widely seen, although it absolutely deserves to be, with it being an especially powerful, and disturbing, recreation of the mid-Apartheid era.

Based on the award-winning, eponymous 1993 novel by Mark Behr, which is widely assigned at school and college level in the country, the film follows the perspective of 11-year-old Marnus (Dawian van der Westhuizen), the younger child of two in the Afrikaner Erasmus family, whose patriarch, Johan (Hilton Pelser), is the country’s youngest army general. It’s 1974 in Cape Town, and the ruling National Party is comfortably maintaining the status quo of segregation. Marnus and his 17-year-old sister, Ilse (Karoline Watson), are preparing for the summer holidays, taking place here in the Southern Hemisphere time of December. Johan, meanwhile, is receiving word that Cuba is training up the Mozambican army, the neighbouring country being one of the main regional opposers of Apartheid; he hosts a Chilean military consultant going by the cover name Mr Smith (Alejandro Goic) – a veteran of Pinochet’s military coup – at their home in the days covered by the story, who will brief him for a campaign on South Africa’s north-eastern border.

Whilst it initially might seem claustrophobic and even repetitive, setting the film almost exclusively in the Erasmus family’s well-appointed, yet eerily traditional, suburban home creates a skin-crawling effect. With no television or other notable mid-century modern accoutrements, and just an upright piano where the musically gifted mother, Leonor (Maude Sandham), plays a familiar classical repertoire for entertainment, the sense of 19th-century colonialism is pungent, also encapsulated by the rotting fruit of the film’s title. Marnus’s gradual realisation of the society in which he lives, and is bred to thrive in, starts when he gauges the discriminatory treatment towards the grandson, named Neville (Courtlin Baron), of the family’s black housemaid, Doreen (Celeste Matthews Wannenburgh). Neville has been accused of stealing the family’s fishing rod, leading to his arrest and torture; word and then photographic evidence of the Mozambican campaign also eventually reach the household, giving an unmistakable sense of the kind of evil nurtured in this home, which we as viewers have been veritable guests in.

Clearly isolating the pride, self-righteousness and entitlement of the country’s white minority ruling class, Trengove and his co-screenwriter, Chris Ciancimino, depict this historical era so forcefully by focusing on the perpetrators, rather than the victims – a knowingly queasy artistic choice recalling The Zone of Interest. Anyone with an interest in, or connection to, South Africa will appreciate what The Smell of Apples captures about its tortured psychology.

The Smell of Apples is a co-production of South Africa, the Netherlands and Chile, staged by Portobello Productions, Cadence, BALDR Film and Quijote Films. Its world sales are handled by Cercamon.