A PIVOTAL SCENE in "Skin," a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction story plucked out of the mess of South Africa's apartheid, has young Sandra Laing's father shouting the good news to the family — "She's white again!"

Surreal and ironic, the moment captures the sensibility of this ambitious, if sometimes uneven, indie film with its eye always on the larger issues of race within one unusual life.

Those three simple words turn out to be anything but good news for dark-skinned Sandy, who was classified "white" at birth, then reclassified "colored" (mixed race) when she was about 10, then classified "white" once more a few years later — the moment captured by that scene.

But Sandy's loss was, in a sense, the filmmaker's gain, handing him a racial story that unfolds in stark black-and-white terms — literally and metaphorically — with the film tracing the attitudes and government edicts, medical tests and court suits, confusion and heartbreak that would batter Sandra, now 54 and still carrying the scars of her experience.

Portrayed by British actress Sophie Okonedo ("Hotel Rwanda") as teenager and adult, with delightful Ella Ramangwane as the child, we see Sandy grapple with the "what are you" question as much as those around her as she struggles to find her place.

The story begins after the Population Registration Act of 1950, which classified all South Africans by race and

Sandy's parents were white Afrikaners: Abraham, an avowed nationalist played with rigid force by Sam Neill, and Alice Krige, as a mother torn. Their oldest child, Leon, was white. Then, due to recessive black genes it would take scientific advancements to eventually figure out, came Sandra, with all the characteristics of a black child, and, later, younger brother Adriaan, also black.

Sandy's color wouldn't initially pose a problem for the family, although there are hints that Abraham wasn't initially convinced the child was his (remember, this is long before the age of DNA testing). But when she was 10 and sent off to boarding school, the real world reared its ugly head. Suddenly the precocious little girl her father called "my angel" was ostracized by her classmates, caned by her teachers and kicked out of school and reclassified as "colored."

Abraham's fight to force the system to change her race back to "white," and the ripple effects of that battle, shape Sandy's life and the rest of the film.

It is easy to see that director Anthony Fabian, who has long made his home in London, has roots in the documentary world (his first, 2001's "Township Opera," was also set in South Africa); it is there in the authentic look of the film, which re-creates the essence of the country from the 1950s through the '90s, to the precision with which he lays out the facts of Sandy's case. But those documentarian genes also haunt "Skin," Fabian's first feature, which at times divides its allegiance to events and the emotions surrounding them.

"Skin" opens with the exuberance of 1994's free elections, apartheid over. Sandy's a media sensation again, as she had been when her case was argued years earlier. But estranged from her white family for years with a life firmly tied to the black community, it has come too late for her.

Then the director takes us down the long road that has gotten her to this place: her sheltered early childhood, her coming of age and the increasingly dark shadow of race on her life.

Neill and Krige do a yeoman's job of not quite letting their characters turn into monsters, although Neill dances very close to the line, with Okonedo using her body to great effect to absorb each rejection they dole out. But too many characters are either good or bad, and that loss of nuance is missed.

In a day when it's difficult to say something new about the racial divide, Sandy's story has a poignant power as it underscores just how deeply the fissures run even when it's all in the family.