Endgame

"Endgame" (2009) is a British political drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Pete Travis. The film reconstructs the secret meetings that took place in the late 1980s — before anyone outside a handful of hotel rooms knew they were happening — between ANC leaders and representatives of the government that would eventually dismantle apartheid.

William Hurt plays Michael Young, a British mining executive who quietly arranges the dialogue; Chiwetel Ejiofor is a young Thabo Mbeki, future president of South Africa; Jonny Lee Miller, Mark Strong, Derek Jacobi, and Clarke Peters fill out a cast that carries the weight of the material without turning it into a lecture. The negotiations are not heroic in any conventional sense — they're tentative, nearly derailed more than once, conducted in secret while bombs go off and governments threaten to collapse.

Travis built the film from declassified documents and accounts of the people who were actually there. What emerges is less a story of triumph than a portrait of what it costs to sit down with your enemy and try not to walk out. Stream "Endgame" online on iFILM.