The movie is inspired by true events; the director's goal was not total accuracy. As quoted in an interview on Netflix.com, director Mandla Dube said: "We don't have a character who has albinism in the real story and the three guys that were in the bank were all males, and I took the liberty to just say, "I want to make one of them female," because I had worked with Noxolo Dlamini on the Netflix series Jiva! Then, obviously, we didn't use the real character names. Once that happened, I said to myself, "Let's have fun. We're not doing a documentary. We're doing a thriller," and all the gloves were off, and we just went to battle to find these characters and to build them and to mold them and shape them into what you see as a final product on the screen"
The actress who plays Rachel is albino. The director wrote a part for her into the script to highlight the treatment and relationships between different identities/races/skin tones in South Africa at the time. A quote from director Mandla Dube from an interview on Netflix.com: "Michelle [Mosalakae], who plays the character of Rachel, grew up near me. Her mom introduced me to her and said, "My daughter's an actress and she's struggling to get roles because of her albinism." I asked her to come to [the] script reading. There was no character written for her, but I said, "Maybe you could read for one of the tellers in the bank, because they are Afrikaans, and they have Caucasian skin tone." She read it well, but I said to myself, she could play a white character but that's cheating. So, I said, "Why don't we write a character for you?""
The filmmaker grew up under apartheid, so he made it his mission to help students engage with the events that ended the decades of state-sponsored segregation. From director Mandla Dube in an interview on Netflix.com: "I remember a local newspaper called Sunday Times showed those guys' bodies on the floor inside the bank with bullet holes all over the area to drive the whole idea of Black terrorists and Black danger. That's just the kind of journalism that took place back then. It horrified me. It traumatized me. I felt like there was a responsibility for me to tell the story."