“I Am All Girls” is a South African crime drama about two women who fight to bring down an international child trafficking union. In a movement that is equally powerful symbolically and as a storytelling tool, the two protagonists’ approach to bringing down the sinister web is in total contradiction. While Jodie (Erica Wessels) is a cop, her partner and companion in the child trafficking defense is Ntombizonke (Hlubi Mboya), who poses as a masked serial killer.

With layers of apparent real-life incidents, historical atrocities, and elements of suspenseful storytelling all put together, the film is an appropriate vehicle for its weighty subject. If “I Am All Girls” has left you more than a few questions, we’re here to help answer them! SPOILERS IN ADVANCE.

I’m all the girls Plot synopsis

“ I Am All Girls ” opens with Ntombi watching a recording of an interrogation of Gert de Jager, a child trafficker arrested in connection with 6 girls who went missing in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1994. The girls n ‘have never been found, and Gert continues to state that there were many more – around 40 – that he had removed on the orders of a high-ranking minister. For the rest of the film, we see the photographs of each of the six missing girls whenever Ntombi executes someone involved in the international child trafficking union.

Jodie, a special agent on the trail of child traffickers in Johannesburg, is then seen looting a suspected hideout, but it’s too late. She and her team discover cages used to store trafficked children, but the perpetrators flee. Later, when the corpse of a retired minister, who was a suspected pedophile, is found in the park with initials engraved on his chest, Jodi begins to suspect that the murder is linked to the missing girls there are many. years.

When another corpse, this time of a pimp involved in child trafficking, shows up, we realize that it is Ntombi who kills the criminals and leads Jodie to the center of the international smuggling network. After a few major arrests, including those of a pastor and a school principal, Jodie’s colleague Arendse begins to suspect that someone from the investigation team is working separately and killing the traffickers. Jodie, realizing that she is talking to Ntombi about her case, begins to suspect her.

Ntombi is also a police forensic scientist and is typically seen working at crime scenes, sometimes belonging to murders she herself committed. Jodie, to confront Ntombi, takes him by car, and they follow a recently released trader called Salim Khan, who is responsible for transporting the children in his shipping containers. When Ntombi refuses to admit being the vigilante, Jodie gets agitated and crashes her car in Salim’s.

I follow all the girls who end: is Jodie becoming the new vigilant?

After a terrible accident in which their car turns over, Jodie remains unconscious. As Salim’s men approach the car, Ntombi shoots them and kidnaps Salim. Later, when Jodie wakes up in the hospital, her boss, Captain George Mululeki, tells her that she is no longer in the force. Unperturbed, Jodie sneaks out of the hospital at night and goes home. There, after watching the video recording of Gert de Jager that Ntombi left her, she realizes that Ntombi herself is a victim.

Jodie goes to Brakpan’s house that Gert mentioned during his interrogation and finds Salim and his brother Pharwaz murdered by Ntombi. She then notices a plane landing at the nearby airfield and realizes that the high-ranking minister, under whose orders Gert was working, is at that time negotiating illegally with the Arabs. Her partner, Arendse, who has followed Jodie, confronts the minister and is killed by his men. Shortly after, Ntombi, who also participated in the shooting, was killed.

Towards the end of the movie, we see a very different Jodie than the one we’ve seen throughout the movie. A cold-blooded hunter of human traffickers, she first ambushes the minister in her house and kills him, engraving Ntombi’s initials on her chest. Then, in the closing scenes of “I’m All Girls,” we see her taking a flight to Iran on her way to apprehend the men the minister was seen with. So has Ntombi passed the baton to Jodie as a new vigilante?

Presumably. From the start of the film, we see that Jodie doesn’t have much of a chance to apprehend criminals through conventional channels. On more than one occasion, she falls into trouble for not following police protocol, which ends up endangering their operation against child traffickers. This point is specifically told to Jodie by her captain and Ntombi on several occasions, but Jodie goes ahead, claiming that she will “do whatever needs to be done”.

It’s easy to imagine that after watching Ntombi quickly work on the notorious child traffickers by murdering them, while frustrated with the intricacies of the legal system itself, Jodie decides to switch over and take the reins as as a new vigilante against child traffickers. This is only highlighted when we see Jodie wearing Ntombi’s hooded trench coat when she goes to assassinate the minister.

Jodie is also a suitable candidate to take the reins of Ntombi, at least more than any other character we see. Apart from Ntombi, she is by far the most passionate agent of force to bring traffickers to justice. Most of her colleagues, including her boss, have a much more clinical and detached approach to it and aren’t as invested as Jodie. She also mentions in passing that she feels that the victims of child trafficking are her children.

Therefore, Jodie has a very deep and passionate interest in the fight against trafficking. We know that Ntombi’s motivation for murdering traffickers comes from her own experiences as a victim of child trafficking, and although Jodie did not go through the ordeal herself, her empathy for the victims in fact. an appropriate vigilante to take the place of Ntombi.

It is also interesting to note how, immediately after becoming a vigilante, Jodie raises the scope of the battle against child traffickers by traveling to Iran to find the minister’s Arab associates, who are seen taking delivery of young people. girls. While Ntombi only killed those in South Africa, Jodie took the fight internationally, which is the real scale of the human trafficking scourge. It remains to be seen how successful she will be in this fight. However, in the final scene, she appears to have the confidence of someone with a winning plan.

Are Ntombi and Jodie lovers?

Throughout the film, we see flashbacks that confirm that Ntombi is herself a victim of child trafficking. Picked up by Gert de Jager and taken to the Minister’s famous house in Brakpan where he takes delivery of trafficked children, she is abused and ultimately taken to a brothel. We then see flashes of her time at the brothel, where she begins to train to fight and also begins to study from an early age.

The last time we see young Ntombi is when she is a teenager and receives an envelope in the mail. Although we are never shown what’s in the envelope, it is almost certainly a letter from an educational institute where she got a scholarship thanks to her self-study in the brothel. The fact that she is growing up to be a forensic expert (in addition to being a vigilante), a job that requires significant scientific knowledge, means that Ntombi has become highly educated.

We also know that she changed her name during this time to Ntombizonke Bapai, which she says means “all girls”. Considering that she is one of the six abducted girls that the film centers on, her original name was Yvette Rossouw. The names of the other five victims seen each time Ntombi kills are Tarrynlee, Frances Hughes, Jenna Hartley, Olivia Booysen, and Abigail Viljoen.

Ntombi’s relationship with Jodie also appears to be intimate, and they are seen expressing affection for each other. It’s not clear if they’re in love, but given Ntombi’s past, it’s likely a complicated physical dynamic that the two share. We get a subtle hint of it when Jodie touches Ntombi’s feet while they’re on the couch at home, and Ntombi takes her feet off. Jodie also tells Ntombi that she loves him, which is not reciprocated until the end of the film with Ntombi’s last words.

The two are also not seen to share much of their pasts, as Ntombi’s story as a victim surprises Jodie. All things considered, it’s highly likely that Jodie and Ntombi haven’t known each other for too long, perhaps because Ntombi is relatively new to the force. While the two share a deep bond, it likely stems from their common empathy for victims of child trafficking. As the film progresses, we see them reconcile their opposing approaches until Jodie essentially “becomes” the new Ntombi.

How many people did Ntombi kill?

The first murder we see Ntombi commit is that of a retired minister. Her confident approach makes it seem like she is well trained in stalking and kidnapping people. This would mean that she has done this before and has killed several people already. The fact that she has a specific outfit to commit the act further confirms this theory. However, it’s interesting to wonder why she didn’t kill the pimp, whom she knew to be an active human trader, earlier.

The history of the Ntombi killings is complicated and difficult to pin down. However, it’s clear that she didn’t start carving initials on the chests of her victims until much later. In all likelihood, the retired minister was the first victim she carved the initials on. As we see, the initials eventually became clues that led Jodie to discover several members of the child trafficking union in South Africa. Therefore, Ntombi most likely adopted this modus operandi specifically to help Jodie in her case. It could also mean that Ntombi had planned the process from the start and that what we see in the film was part of her plan to help authorities uncover the criminal network that victimized her and countless others.

Read more: Where am I all the girls filmed?