Dir. Oliver Schmitz, 2010, South Africa/Germany, 100 min, in Sepedi/French with subtitles

Cast: Khomotso Manyaka, Keaobaka Makanyane, Harriet Lenabe, Lerato Mvelase

Review by Kevin Gill

Life, Above All is a largely faithful adaptation of Canadian writer Alan Stratton’s novel Chanda’s Secrets, which follows 16-year-old Chanda’s attempts to protect her sick mother and wayward best friend from the hostility of the local community in a small South African township. The novel, pitched at young adults, was released to critical acclaim in 2004 and went on to win multiple literary awards. It has now been printed in many languages and has even spawned a follow-up, Chanda’s Wars. The novel’s popularity is understandable – it features an incredibly courageous and fiercely honourable “up against it” heroine, a vibrant collection of both sympathetic and sinister supporting characters, an exotic yet familiar sun-scorched setting and a highly dramatic, emotionally resonant storyline that offers the reader a way in to engaging with some big issues of the day, most notably the AIDS pandemic in Africa.

Not only does German-born South African director Oliver Schmitz preserve all these qualities in this screen version, he also brings the material vividly to life with an unerring sense of local authenticity. The township of Elandsdoorn in the province of Mpumalanga is both the film’s setting and its shooting location, while the actors – many of whom were hired in Elandsdoorn – speak in Sepedi, a lively local dialect, and give strong performances across the board. Most notable in this regard is Khomotso Manyaka, a first-time actress who portrays Chanda with a compelling and memorable mixture of adolescent vulnerability and steely-eyed determination.

The challenges faced by this 12-year-old girl (Schmitz took the brave decision of lowering her age for the film) begin with her having to barter with a coffin maker over the price of her baby stepsister’s casket and end with her standing up to an angry mob, who want to run her mother, who is sick with “the bug”, out of town. Chanda has intelligence on her side but AIDS is a dirty, unspoken word to the uneducated, prejudiced people of this religious township, who live in fear of the disease and ostracize – or even murder – those who have it. The fact that Chanda’s mother has contracted the disease through no fault of her own (we assume it has been passed on by her drug-addicted, promiscuous husband) is by the by – in the collective eyes of the township the devil is at work.

To them, AIDS is symbolised by people like Chanda’s best friend Esther (Keaobaka Makanyane, also 12-years-old in the film), a lone orphan who has so little regard for herself that she turns to prostitution and later reports that she has been beaten and raped by policemen to teach her a lesson about her wayward ways. It’s up to Chanda to nurse Esther back to health against the wishes of her meddling but well-meaning neighbour Mrs. Tafa (Harriet Lenabe), while also taking care of her two remaining younger siblings and going against the grain of the community to allow her mother a dignified death.

With child protagonists suffering such hardships, it is strange to say that Life, Above All does not deliver the hard-hitting emotional punch one might expect. This is partly because the film admirably refuses to manipulate the viewer with overwrought melodrama, but also because it has a workmanlike, pedestrian quality that allows little room for a tangible sense of tension or danger to develop. Schmitz’s faithfulness to the material means that he handles it with kid gloves: the narrative never wavers from its strictly linear and economical cause-and-effect path, while crises and plot developments are heavily signposted by for example meaningful looks and words between characters, the sounds of whispers on the soundtrack or a torrential storm tearing through the township. As with the novel, it is very easy to imagine young adults being deeply moved, enlightened, surprised and inspired by Life, Above All, but although the film undoubtedly has universal appeal, the tweaks to the title and the ages of the younger characters are unlikely to be enough to elicit a similarly profound response from an older, more demanding audience. 

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