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"The straightforward hero is a rare thing," says Michael Samuels, who wrote and directed the film. "We like our heroes to be unblemished, without fault, and I think that's naive and too simplistic. It's far more complicated."

Samuels is best-known for his award-winning TV films The Curse Of Steptoe, The Falklands Play and Our Hidden Lives.

"What I look for is the stuff of compelling drama in anything," he says, "but factual drama is often exciting because you take an event or person and look behind the curtain to tell the bigger story."

Samuels studied South African history while at university and threw himself enthusiastically into the research for the story of Winnie Mandela.

"I read and watched absolutely everything I could lay my hands on – books in and out of print, newspaper articles from the last 30-odd years, newspaper interviews, loads of old TV footage. I also spent a period in South Africa talking with people from all points of view who knew Winnie."

Samuels says he became increasingly fascinated by this extraordinary woman who became so strongly associated with the fight against apartheid.

"But I felt a sense of real sadness when the drip, drip of revelations started coming out in the late Eighties. To me she seemed such a complex and ultimately tragic person."

Samuels views Winnie's story as "basically a tragedy. She is a woman who resisted everything the state could throw at her. But I think the reverse side of the coin, the reverse side of the coin to that spirit that stubbornly refused to be ground down, was also the thing that made her capable of some of those questionable actions in the late Eighties. Winnie says that it was the system that taught her how to hate, and there's no doubt in my mind that the apartheid system brutalised her, yet I think it's far more complex than just that."

He developed a screenplay that explored three story threads – one taking place in the immediate aftermath of Nelson's release from prison; one constituting a broad sweep over the 30 years following her courtship with Nelson; and another depicting the five days she spent being interrogated by Major Swanepoel.

"The idea of scenes from these different time frames bouncing and colliding off each other really attracted me," Samuels comments.

"I'm fascinated by the idea that we are all products of our past experiences and that we walk around with the baggage from the past living and breathing within us, and that it's this baggage that informs the choices we make in 'the now'.

"It's so appropriate for Winnie who had so many extraordinary experiences, all of which must have informed the choices she made later in life."