SABC2's new series, Heartlines, kicks off this Sunday with The Miner, a film set in a small mining town where two families are forced to re-evaluate notions of culture and race.
The Miner is billed as a film about acceptance, one of eight values that make up the Heartlines series.
The other values to be explored in the next couple of weeks are responsibility, forgiveness, perseverance, self-control, honesty, compassion and grace.
In The Miner, we meet the Meyers and the Mokwenas.
On the one side there is single parent Johnny Meyer (Jonathan Pienaar) and his teenage daughter Sandra (Charlotte Savage).
On the other, there is Dan Mokwena (Lennox Mathabethe) and his family, including his rebellious son Moagi (Neo Ntlateng).
Johnny and Dan are colleagues, but are unaware that their kids are in the same class at school. Work becomes tense when Johnny is overlooked for promotion and Dan becomes his boss.
The situation is ignited when the two fathers discover that their kids are friends.
Dan threatens to send Moagi back to boarding school if he continues to be friends with the "white girl" and Johnny is at pains to explain to Sandra that "they" are different to "us".
But kids in the new South Africa are made of sterner stuff and Sandra and Moagi are determined that their friendship will not be sullied by their parents' baggage from the past. Their fathers, however, are also not willing to compromise their ingrained beliefs.
Their unwillingness to look beyond the superficial results in a dramatic turning point, one which changes their lives.
The Miner challenges viewers to confront issues of race, identity, culture and acceptance.
The Miner presents Sandra and Dan as a model of the future where relationships in South Africa are built on commonalties and where differences are celebrated, not used as a reason to foment stereotypes based on ignorance.
The movie is a well-acted, decently scripted film that presents a slice of South African life that is as real as the challenges its inhabitants face every day.
Good production values and a killer soundtrack featuring a host of local artists make The Miner a pleasure to watch.
But the movie may make some people cringe, with the more cynical dismissing it as a syrupy attempt to mask a troubled national psyche with an overly optimistic view of the future.
- The Miner is scheduled to be broadcast on SABC2 at 8pm on Sunday.