THE past can sometimes be a challenging mirror to the present. In the recent absence of effective political opposition to George Bush in the US Congress and to Tony Blair in the UK, movies have been stepping in to fill the vacuum using . . . whether in Good Night and Good Luck or The Wind That Shakes The Barley . . . historical events as a coded critique of contemporary politics.

"The press and television have failed in the US and have done whatever the administration wanted them to, " says director Michael Apted, whose movie Amazing Grace while ostensibly telling the story of English abolitionist William Wilberforce's dogged and, in 1807 successful, campaign to end the lucrative slave trade also speaks to today and the insidious way patriotism has been manipulated to stiffle dissent.

"When Wilberforce is told that opposition would be seen as sedition, it is exactly what Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were saying to the American people. If you are against us, you are for terrorism, you can't criticise us because it will be treachery. The challenge for Wilberforce and the whole abolitionist movement was that people didn't really know about slavery, only what they were told. It has been the same with Iraq. The monstrosity goes on because it doesn't seem to directly affect our own daily life."

Although set in South Africa in the 1980s, Philip Noyce's Catch a Fire has similar contemporary relevance. Tim Robbins plays a white security officer who attempts to wring a confession out of Patrick Charmusso, an innocent oil refinery worker . . .portrayed by Derek Luke . . . who came under suspicion and was arrested and tortured, simply because he was black, much like many Muslims today have been abducted and incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay because of who they are rather than anything they may have done.

To Noyce, parallels between the apartheid government's attempts to repress armed black resistance and President Bush's response to the Al-Qaida threat in the aftermath of 9/11 are inescapable. "Catch A Fire is a film that actually is about yesterday but could be about today, " he tells me. "In trying to quell black resistance the apartheid regime built its own coffin. Oppression will always breed opposition. It's a foregone conclusion. The human spirit will fight back. Right now ordinary people are being politicised all around us by what is being done in the name of the war on terror.

Probably we've exacerbated the problem so much that our grandchildren will still not be able to deal it it. That's what happens with Charmusso. He's pushed so far down that he comes back as a coiled spring."

With Catch A Fire, 57-year-old Noyce is back where he started, and glad to be there. He first made his name in Australia in the 1970s, during the liberalising Gough Whitlam era, making independent low-budget movies about issues that mattered.

Backroads dealt with the marginalisation of the aborigines, Newsfront was a perceptive take on 1950s anti-Communist paranoia. His thriller Dead Calm, launching Nicole Kidman as an international star, lured him to Los Angeles where he gave political edge to action blockbusters like Patriot Games and Clear And Present Danger, adapted from the Tom Clancy bestsellers and featuring Harrison Ford as the reluctant CIA agent Jack Ryan.

Ryan's stubborn integrity led him to question a White House administration infested with Oliver North characters, an enemy within subverting the democratic process while a Reagan-like president disclaimed responsibility, saying: "The course of action I'd suggest is not a course of action I can suggest."

Noyce is a pioneering figure in a wave of politicised mainstream cinema . . . typified by Fahrenheit 9/11, Good Night And Good Luck, Syriana, Fast Food Nation, Hotel Rwanda and An Inconvenient Truth . . . that has revolutionised mainstream American cinema, providing a popular challenge to neo-con paranoia. His remake of the Graham Greene thriller The Quiet American became a metaphor for the folly of covert American intervention abroad, while Rabbit-Proof Fence turned the true story of the forcible removal of 'half caste' children from their aboriginal mothers in the 1930s into a cautionary tale directed at a right-wing Australia where racism has again become a destabilising force.

"People are fed up with the failure of political leaders, " he says. "They are responding to politically themed movies because they are part of a people's movement. Climate change is now being taken seriously by governments but it's been taken seriously by the people for a long time. Films that deal with political issues are giving release to a collective frustration with the way in which we're being led."

Noyce made the decision to film Catch A Fire in the aftermath of 9/11. "That morning I was in New York taking Rabbit Proof Fence to a meeting with Miramax at their cinema on Greenwich Avenue, " he says. "I was 20 minutes early. As I was coming up to the corner at 8.40 am I noticed people running from the World Trade Centre. I got out of the car and saw what looked like a commuter train sticking out of one the towers. I stood there for a couple of hours as one building fell and then the other.

"Afterwards, as everyone was calling for immediate and terrible retribution and as attacks were launched, I kept thinking we want to destroy everybody but maybe we should actually try to work out why they hate us. We might be able to defeat them if we followed the military adage of knowing your enemy.

"Then I got the script of Catch A Fire. I thought while there might be absolutely no comparison between the freedom struggle in South Africa and the war against terrorism what they did have in common was this willingness to give up their lives to prosecute a cause. It seemed as though Catch A Fire was an allegory, not only in the way it takes us inside the mind of a man who feels he has no other way of expressing himself than through taking up arms but also in the methods that are used to extinguish this opposition."

Nelson Mandela's solution in South Africa was to put the past behind through reconciliation.

"And they did it, " says Noyce. "It's still a miracle that's in transition, because you can't overnight eradicate all the inequalities of apartheid. But they're not killing each other any more.

"It makes you wonder if it would it have been better if the billions spent on retribution after 9/11 had been spent instead on education and on closing the gap between two societies and belief systems. It certainly could not have been worse."

Noyce, who has lived on and off in Los Angeles since the early 1990s . . . "but more off than on, I could never truly be an American" . . . is now working on an adaptation of Philip Roth's American Pastoral. "The period picks up after Newsfront. It's sort of a continuation of that story into the 1970s, but also dovetails with Catch A Fire. It's like The Searchers, a father's undying lover a a daughter who is lost to him."

Michael Apted, now 66 years old, cut his teeth in British television producing World in Action and Coronation Street, before moving to Los Angeles 20 years ago where his directing credits include CoalMiner's Daughter, Gorky Park, Gorillas In The Mist and the James Bond movie Tomorrow Is Not Enough.

"I had always been looking to do a film about politics, " he says.

"I was sort of distressed by how cynical and uninterested people were in politics which, in a way, you can understand but isn't very healthy. I just wanted to find a story that presented politics in a slightly more positive light. Then the Amazing Grace script came to me, a biopic that had been around some time. I changed it so that it's not so much about slavery . . . or a straight 'life of ' . . . but more about political actions and how things can get done if you've got the will and the courage to do it.

"Occasionally there are moments in history when religion feeds politics rather than dominates it. Someone like Wilberforce can be both spiritual and also a very savvy politician and not above dirty tricks to get what he wants. You look around and that's very rare today.

Religion has become a negative force. It's one of the more frightening legacies this generation is going to leave, with Islam, Judaism and Christianity ranged against each other."

Apted has just finished a documentary The Power of the Game, which is about the wider impact of football in different cultures. "I remember when I was filming Gorillas in the Mist in Rwanda, it was like living in the 12th century - an incredible culture, no infrastructure, no roads, no nothing, apocalyptic with AIDS, starvation. I drove into the bush and these kids were playing football, shouting 'Maradona, Maradona'. They'd never seen a newspaper or heard of radio, yet they had these little shirts on and they were kicking a ball about. So what was that all about?

"The Power of the Game looks at how intertwined football was with the African National Congress in its fight against apartheid and how the same people who ran the ANC now run the country and how crucial staging the 2010 World Cup is for South Africa and for the continent. It's the biggest event they've ever staged in Africa and they're desperate to pull it off. I also deal with how football is a tipping point for women's rights in Iran, and provides social empowerment in South America."

Apted is a life-long supporter of West Ham, currently languishing at the foot of the Premiership. "We're on a ghastly rollercoaster, " he says, "I wish we had a player like Benni McCarthy, the South African who plays for Blackburn Rovers. That's the great thing about football. It can penetrate more cultures and more places in the world that any religion or political idea - for better or for worse. It can be a redemptive factor, building bridges between generations and between cultures."

'Catch A Fire' and 'Amazing Grace' both opened on Friday.