Barbara Hershey won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival for her role in this film. She won the same award in the previous year for Shy People (1987), making her the only actress or actor (as of 2015) to win consecutive awards in Cannes for performance (though in this movie she shared the award with her two female co-stars, Jodhi May and Linda Mvusi).
Shawn Slovo wrote the screenplay about her own growing up in South Africa, Molly being the screen representation of herself. The film is dedicated to her real life mother, Ruth First (the character of Diana in the movie).
One of a mini-cycle of late 1980s anti-apartheid themed movies. The films are Cry Freedom (1987), A World Apart (1988) and Una árida estación blanca (1989), each released in subsequent years. The Power of One (1992) would follow early in the next decade of the 1990s. A majority of anti-apartheid films were filmed in Zimbabwe in response to the international economic sanctions against South Africa's Apartheid regime. During the apartheid regime, anti-apartheid films, including Western films depicting interracial relationships (the James Bond film 007: Vive y deja morir (1973) was heavily censored when released for the South African market) were banned by the South African government until the 1994 election of Nelson Mandela.