Disgrace

Disgrace is a crime drama about David Lurie, a Cape Town university professor of Romantic poetry whose affair with a student brings scandal on him. Dismissed from his post, he leaves the city for the rural Eastern Cape to stay with his daughter Lucy, who runs an isolated farm in a region changed by the end of apartheid. What awaits him there forces him to confront violence and his own powerlessness.

Steve Jacobs directed the film, working from a screenplay he wrote with Anna Maria Monticelli, based on J.M. Coetzee's novel. John Malkovich leads as Lurie, with Jessica Haines as Lucy, Ériq Ebouaney as Petrus, Fiona Press as Bev Shaw, Antoinette Engel as Melanie Isaacs and Natalie Becker as Soraya, among a credited cast of 26. The film runs 120 minutes and was shot as a co-production between Australia, South Africa, the Netherlands, the Netherlands Antilles and the United States.

Released in 2008, the film had a budget of 10 million USD and returned about 2 million USD worldwide, a shortfall suggesting it found only a limited audience. On IMDb it holds 6.5/10 from 6,000 votes, while on TMDB it has 6.2/10 from 90 votes, so viewers generally received it with moderate approval. A critics' rating of 6.9/10 from 60 reviews places professional assessments slightly above the audience scores.