A Call for life
Few weeks before the Football World Championship, everybody is looking to South Africa as a host of the most popular event. The participation of the south-African cinema in Cannes could quite not be seen despite a real effort and presence of a film in an important competition.
In Un Certain Regard, a parallel section but a part of the official selection in Cannes film festival, Olivier Schmidtz (Cap Town, 1960) presented his new feature called Life, above all. He was the third African film maker in Cannes this year with the Chadian Mahamat-Saleh Haroun and the Algerian Rachid Bouchareb.
Schmidt is well known as an engaged film maker. His previous feature, Highjack Story (2000) was a statement against violence and poverty in the suburbs of Johannesburg.
Already with the first participation in Cannes with Mapantsula (1988) Olivier Schmidtz showed that he wants to use cinema as platform of denunciation of all south-African society pains. Mapantsula was then a scream against the injustice and the absurdity of the racist regime of Apartheid.
South-African film maker was proud to be in the biggest international film show case. “It is the fourth time I am in selection in Cannes, he said to the press, but you do not get blasé about it because it’s really the cream of what happens every year in the film world”.
Nowhere else, a film crew would like to be in fact. Greg Buckle, the Co-producer pointed the importance of being in such a film event and meets a special audience “So far it’s been a great exposure, watching the reaction of people coming out of the cinema.”
The new film is quite a touching story about prejudices, sleekness and poverty. The protagonist, Chanda, is only 12 years old. However she is force to challenge the whole society in her small dusty village near Johannesburg.
The young girl has to face a very bad time. Her newly-born baby sister dies. Her father accuses the mother to be the cause of this los. He dies from alcoholism. Soon later, the mother is seek and accused by the village to be a source of devil. She has to leave and go to die alone far from any human life.
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