I didn't actually realise what apartheid meant. I'm probably a bit naive, but I thought it was more of a vague segregation, like on the beaches and buses.
Realism is always subjective in film. There's no such thing as cinema verite. The only true cinema verite would be what Andy Warhol did with his film about the Empire State Building - eight hours or so from one angle, and even then it's not really cinema verite, because you aren't actually there.
Different' and 'new' is relatively easy. Doing something that's genuinely better is very hard.