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In the dusty small town of Elandsdoorn, a South African township not far from Johannesburg, life is simple and serene. A prevailing sense of deep pride tightly bonds together the entire community - but beware to those who step out of line... 12-year-old Chanda is a hardworking promising young student with a bright future, but her life changes dramatically when her baby sister unexpectedly dies. Heartbroken, Chanda's mother, Lillian, in turn becomes severely ill.
Her stepfather drowns himself in alcohol, leaving the young girl to take care of her two smaller siblings. Meanwhile, the formerly friendly neighbors become increasingly distant and gossip spreads. "Auntie" Tafa does what she can to help by getting Lillian to leave town, but not even "Auntie" is immune to the cloud of fear filtering across Elandsdoorn. Suspecting that the community's irrational ostracism has to do with her mother's illness and the death of her baby sister, Chanda demands answers but is met with stubborn silence. Unwilling to bear the weight of secrecy any longer, Chanda sets out to face a deeply engrained, unspoken taboo...
As part of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival here in Toronto, my lovely wife and I made our way down to the TIFF Lightbox to take in “Life, Above All“. It’s a South African film which, according to the synopsis, is about “a young girl [Chanda] in a small, AIDS-ravaged South African township who struggles to maintain a façade of normal life amidst utter instability: her stepfather is an alcoholic, her newborn sister has recently died, and her mother has become afflicted with the AIDS virus.”
The community turns against the family and Chanda’s best friend, Esther, who has to turn to ‘whoring’ to make money after her parent’s deaths. The story is a powerful one and a snapshot of some of the devastation that HIV/AIDS can wreak. Still, I think there were some further things to draw from the film that haven’t been touched on in other reviews.
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As one review states it, the movie is a “slightly soft lob to conscientious liberal audiences with a weakness for adorable, poverty-stricken kids”. Every movie tells a story and, beyond that story, is an underlying message. Even those cheesy popcorn action flicks have messages that are being portrayed – there’s no such thing as a story without a meaning or, multiple meanings. So how do filmmakers choose to tell the story and shape the message? In the case of poverty, or HIV, or war, or just about any other human rights issues, the story tends to be told through “adorable” kids.
My comment after the movie was just this, “How can we tell a different story of HIV/AIDS?” Or even further, a different story of South Africa or Africa as a larger body. How often is it a story of children triumphing over the odds of brutal Africa? Or brutal slums of India? I’m not sure that there’s anything inherently wrong with telling these stories. What Human Rights Watch was very right about in their brief presentation is this: HIV/AIDS is very much a human rights issue despite it’s frequent portrayal as merely a medical or sexual issue. It strikes those how have been made the most vulnerable (through gender, location, disability, etc, globalization, etc…) who then, being vulnerable, have the least access to treatment. So in this way, the stories of children and women are important to tell – they are the ones bearing the brunt of the burden.
