Black Butterflies is an English-language Dutch drama film about the life of South-African Afrikaans poet and anti-apartheid political dissident Ingrid Jonker.

The film was directed by Paula van der Oest and premiered in the Netherlands on February 6 before being released on 31 March 2011.

As her body is carried away in a hearse, the politician Abraham Jonker (Rutger Hauer) arrives and expresses shock that the girls have no shoes.

Decades later, in 1960, an adult Ingrid (Carice van Houten) is swimming against the current near the Cape Town suburb of Clifton when she starts to go under.

Abraham tells Ingrid that her estranged husband, Pieter Venter, asked for a ride to her house.

The writer tells Jack that Ingrid's father, Abraham Jonker, represents the White Supremacist National Party in Parliament and is the Chair of the Censorship Board which banned his novel.

Eugene is a fan of Ingrid's poetry, and poet and playwright Uys Krige lauds Maritz as the great hope of Afrikaans literature.

The horror of this motivates Ingrid to write her most famous poem, Die Kind, which calls the child a martyr and subtly prophesies that one day Apartheid will end.

Meanwhile, Abraham Jonker is depicted as a tyrannical man who withholds validation and affection from his daughter and who is enraged by her political dissent against Apartheid, her friendships with dissident writers whose work he bans, and her own poetry.

Ingrid's interpersonal issues with her father and the love triangle with Jack and Eugene lead her into major depression and psychosis.

She is committed to Valkenberg Hospital, where Jack visits her and learns about Ingrid's secret termination of their unborn child.

She goes to Jack's home one night and gives him her AFB medal along with a Walt Whitman poem as a statement of her love for him.

The film ends as the camera pans over the sea as a recording of Jack Cope and Uys Krige's English translation of Ingrid Jonker's poem Die Kind is read aloud by Nelson Mandela.

The text reveals that Mandela read the poem during his first address as President to the South African Parliament after the end of Apartheid.

[1] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 66 out of 100, based on nine critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.