Life Above All

“LIFE, ABOVE ALL” (***1/2)
It speaks to our general cynicism, and a particular blind spot of the Academy, that the second I Twittered my prediction of Oscar success for this artlessly moving South African social drama, every reply I got was in the “is it that bad” vein. On the contrary, it’s very strong indeed: a slightly soft lob to conscientious liberal audiences with a weakness for adorable, poverty-stricken kids, but more alert and tough-minded than any equivalent title to emerge from the country in the last decade. For Oliver Schmitz, it’s a welcome (and much improved) return to feature filmmaking 10 years after the worthy but wonky “Hijack Stories,” and nearly scaling the heights of his exemplary 1988 debut “Mapantsula.”
Carrying the film on her slender shoulders is young Khomotso Manyaka: terse, resourceful and thoroughly winning as a 12 year-old girl in a rural Highveld village who is left holding down the fort when her baby sister dies and her mother withdraws completely. It doesn’t take long to figure out that this is but one story representing many in the wake of the ANC government’s appalling handling of the AIDS epidemic — indeed, the film features an end-credits dedication to the country’s 800,000 orphans of the disease — but Schmitz largely avoids pedantic moralizing to observe instead the rituals and reservations of community, a large faction of which is still in denial of the crisis decimating their numbers.
The film wobbles a little when it lets characters talk about about the issues at hand, rather than merely letting their circumstances do the work, but this is stirring, upsetting material all the same — richly lensed by Bernhard Jasper, with a sharp sense of locale and landscape, not least in a brief, vivid sequence depicting the onset of one of the electrical storms so familiar to the area in summer. That’s a fairly specific virtue, but “Life, Above All” is broadly resonant enough to merit international exposure beyond the Croisette. - Guy Lodge