"It's painful," says Patrick Chamusso of the experience of seeing his life story in feature-film form. "You see the things that are forgotten for 20 years and it comes back to you. But it's good, too. The film is made well, and I am still alive."

Just the fact of Chamusso's survival is an extraordinary thing. A smartly rendered docudrama by Australian director Philip Noyce, Catch a Fire charts his transformation from an ordinary man to a gun-toting militant in early-'80s South Africa. After Chamusso (Antwone Fisher's Derek Luke) is wrongly persecuted and tortured for a bombing at the coal refinery where he works, he takes more extreme forms of action as a member of the African National Congress' military wing. Though determined to stop him, policeman Nic Vos (Tim Robbins) knows he and his kind are fighting a losing battle against the ANC "terrorists."

A gripping look at apartheid's violent death throes, Catch a Fire loses heat whenever Noyce abides too closely to thriller conventions but it's elevated by Luke's convincing performance and the incredible details of Chamusso's experience. These were adapted for the screen by Shawn Slovo, son of the late Joe Slovo, long-time leader of South Africa's communist party and the ANC's military wing. Shawn Slovo first interviewed Chamusso shortly after he'd been released from Robben Island in 1994, having been granted amnesty after 10 years of a 24-year sentence. (He and his wife, Conney, now run the Two Sisters orphanage in Mganduzweni.)

Speaking in an interview around the time of Catch a Fire's world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last month, Chamusso expresses amazement that his life could be the stuff of movies. "Even myself, I thought history was only made by generals and presidents," he says. "But even a man like me can make a history."

"Patrick was a man of the people," says Luke. "This wasn't the story of a leader."

"This was an average man who had a lot at stake and had to go with what he believed in. It shows how powerful it is for one man's actions to be part of a whole century of change."

The film emphasizes the personal cost of those actions (Chamusso does so in an even more direct fashion when he shows me the bullet scar on his leg). But Catch a Fire is also a potent and pressing lesson on the importance of forgiveness, South Africa's Truth and Reconcilation Commission having become a model for other countries hoping to escape from a legacy of violence.

"There's still a lot to be done between black and white," says Chamusso. "Maybe it's easier for our children because they go together to school. People my age didn't even dream that black children would walk to a white school. But today it's happening because of what we did. If we didn't force that government, it wouldn't have happened."