David Burns: Love Thine Enemy

NOTE: This is reposted because the DVD edition of "Tracker" is now available.

Love thine enemy...  Forgive those who persecute you... 

I have never suffered war.  I have lived in London most of my life and have been deeply blessed with a safe, secure and quiet life.  Christ's commands are therefore, I am relieved to say, theoretical for me.  But how would I feel towards the Germans if I'd suffered the Blitz?  If I'd seen my home, my friend's homes, bombed, destroyed; women, children, entire families annihilated?   How would I feel towards the white man if I had been a Native American, an Australian Aboriginal, an African bushman?  As a Christian film producer, I wanted to make a film that explored the complexity and difficulty facing Christians who have truly suffered at the hands of an enemy; whose lives have been irrevocably damaged by not only the inconsolable grief of the loss of their loved ones but also the resultant fury and hatred of the enemy.

When I first read Tracker , written by Nicolas van Pallandt, I knew I'd found the right script.  Set in 1903, the story revolves around two mature men whose lives have become defined by the atrocities they've suffered at the hands of the British. 

This was a particularly pertinent subject matter for me.  As an English Christian, it is very difficult to think of the Great British Empire without the deepest shame: an Empire as venal as the Conquistadors, on which "the sun never set and the blood never dried"; an Empire that was known and hated across the entire globe.  Extraordinary that a nation that produced Shakespeare, Dickens, Wordsworth and Donne, whose laws are based on Christian principles and was the first nation in the world to abolish slavery, is the same nation that grew fat and powerful on the suffering of millions.  But it is this very contradiction that reveals the problem.  It was Wilberforce whose indefatigable persistence led to the stopping of slavery, not "the British".  It was individuals in the invading British armies that carried out the atrocities, not "the British".  It is this distinction between individuals and a Nation's responsibility that Tracker explores and makes it unique.

Tracker's central character is Arjan van Diemen, a South African farmer who lost everything at the hands of the British in the Boer War.  His farm was destroyed and his land salted under Kitchener's Scorched Earth policy. Worse, his family was herded away to die in a concentration camp.  All that Arjan knew and held dear was gone and with it went his faith.  He joined a rabble of guerilla fighters and for the last two years of the war, in acts of ineffectual futility, he killed and committed atrocities against the British invaders. 

When the war ended and the Boers were given a King's Pardon, he had nothing left.  New Zealand soldiers had boosted the ranks of the British and when the soldiers left South Africa to return home, Arjan, along with other disenfranchised Boers, joined them in the vague hope of starting a new life.

Arriving in New Zealand penniless, Arjan (partly out of necessity and partly because he suspects the local British commanding officer of complicity in his family's deaths) accepts the offer of a bounty to hunt down a fugitive Maori accused of killing a soldier.

From the outset, we know that the Maori is innocent; and as the film progresses we grow to understand that he too suffered deeply at the hands of the same enemy.  As a boy, he had witnessed his father and grandfather publicly hanged after being defeated in battle by the British.  To his own shame, he ran and has only now returned in the hope of carrying out an ancient ritual to cleanse his family honor.

So Tracker has all the necessary ingredients for an Unforgiven , a Pale Rider , a High Plains Drifter.  The tracker and the fugitive, victims of the cruel and ruthless British, return to town guns blazing and destroy their enemy in a decisive and satisfying denouement.  And we go home knowing that they have had their vengeance and the bad guys have had their comeuppance.

But that's not a film that helps a Christian understand how to forgive his enemy, and to forgive himself for losing his faith; becoming the very kind of person that he hates.  We glimpse the change that starts to take place in Arjan when, having captured the fugitive, he explains that his South African neighbor had hung on of Arjan's friends, an old African bushman, for stealing a duck.  Worse, the neighbor had left him hanging for six months as an example.  This was the freedom Arjan had been fighting for; a freedom that would allow his own people, the white South Africans, to continue being conquerors themselves.

Arjan finally grasps a simple truth: "I don't hate the British".  It is people that sin, not nations.  And it is people, individuals, who we, as Christians, must struggle to forgive...