Wallander - Rolf Lassgård - Den vita lejoninnan (The White Lioness) - 1996 - new soft subs - DVDrip x264

Searching for a missing Ystad real estate agent, Wallander stumbles upon an intercontinental assassination plot.

The video quality, I'll be honest, is somewhat atrocious - some bad lighting, bad shooting and a bad transfer, especially noisy in darker scenes. On the other hand, there are a few bits that look quite nice. I've cropped to remove letterboxing but retain as much of the picture as possible, and the result is a nearly-widescreen AR of 1.636 (a little wider than 16:10).

This movie was shown on Swedish TV on 1 November 1996. German and Spanish dubbed versions have been made, but I've only been able to locate the original audio and the Spanish dub. Es tut mir viel Leid, lieben Deutschen. (Apparently it was also released in France and Finland, but it's unclear if these versions were dubbed or subbed.)

Most rips of The White Lioness contain factory hard subs in either Swedish or English. I've OCRed those hard subs (with a lot of manual correction, of course) and taken the video from the Spanish release, which has NO hard subs.

There are several soft sub choices: The default sub track (#1) translates all non-English dialogue into English. Track #2 adds a transcript of the English dialogue, for the hard of hearing and to assist with any further translation. Track #3 contains minimal Swedish subs that omit the English, Danish, and Norwegian lines, as many Swedish speakers will be able to understand these. Track #4 is a complete set of Swedish subs, including the English, Danish, and Norwegian dialogue. Track #5 is a complete Spanish translation credited to "Oldie," which I've re-synced and tweaked a little. These were all the subs I could find.

Many thanks to Henning Mankell, the cast and crew of Den vita lejoninnan, and the subbers and dubbers.


Did you know?

• The movie opens with an aerial shot of Table Mountain, a giant sandstone plateau that overlooks Cape Town. It's shown throughout the movie as an establishing shot for the Cape Town scenes. September mentions it once, referring to it simply as "the mountain."
  
• The South African rand is worth about a dime, so half a million rand is about $50,000.
  
• Apartheid refers to the legally enforced racial segregation of the South African population. Some apartheid laws date back to the 19th century, but the word generally refers to the era after the right-wing National Party came into power in 1948. White South Africans were given preferential treatment in real estate, health care, education, employment, and public transportation. Political dissent was brutally suppressed. Non-whites had no voting rights and were forced to live in segregated townships. Interracial sex was prohibited by law. "Blacks" (with pure African heritage) and "coloureds" (with mixed heritage, mostly African, Dutch, and Indian) were legally distinct ethnic groups and were governed by different apartheid laws, which generally gave more rights to coloureds than blacks.
  
• This story takes place in 1993, at the twilight of the apartheid era, when President F.W. de Klerk of the National Party and Nelson Mandela, leader of anti-apartheid African National Congress, cooperatively oversaw the dismantling of apartheid laws, culminating in free elections. This was a very turbulent time in South Africa, with violent clashes between pro- and anti-apartheid activists, and also between rival anti-apartheid factions. Many believed the country would fall into civil war.
  
• South Africa has 20 official languages, but aside from English the dominant language in Cape Town is Afrikaans, the Dutch dialect spoken by the Afrikaners (descendants of white Europeans, mainly 17th-century Dutch colonists.)
  
• The Broederbond is a secret society of influential white South African men, formed with the goal of preserving Afrikaner culture and power. They were often seen as the power behind the National Party. All of the apartheid-era presidents of South Africa were Broederbond members.
  
• Olof Palme was prime minister of Sweden twice - from 1969 to 1976, and from 1982 to 1986. Domestically, he was a champion of public health and welfare, gender equality, and nuclear power. He was also a harsh critic of world powers that he saw as inhumane and abusive, including the U.S.A., U.S.S.R., Spain, Chile, Israel, and South Africa. He was particularly critical of apartheid, and an ardent supporter of the African National Congress. Palme was assassinated in February 1986. The crime has never been solved, but many believe he was killed by South African security forces because of his support of the ANC. Some suspect other state security services, including the CIA and KGB. Others believe the killer was simply a petty criminal who mistook Palme (who was walking home at night without a bodyguard) for his drug dealer.
  
• Mabasha's Glock 19 pistol is called out as an exotic weapon, but this characterization was already a little out-of-date. There were several hundred thousand Glocks manufactured by 1993, and the Glock 19 had already been adopted as an official sidearm by the Swedish armed forces. It is now the most popular handgun brand in the world.
  
• The Nobel Prizes for literature and the sciences are awarded in Stockholm, Sweden, Alfred Nobel's birthplace, but for unknown reasons his will indicated that the prize for peace should be awarded in Norway.