Writing from Cannes in May, I broke form to issue my only concrete Oscar prediction of the year: that Oliver Schmitz’s South African AIDS-crisis drama “Life, Above All” (then competing in the Un Certain Regard strand) will be nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar next year, and could even win.
“Is it that bad?” quipped some of my colleagues after I wrote this. On the contrary: Schmitz’s film, impressively shouldered by 12 year-old actress Khomotoso Manyaka, takes a measured, moving approach to subject matter that could lend itself to didacticism. It’s a richer, more searching film than Darrell James Roodts’s similarly themed “Yesterday,” which, you might recall, earned South Africa its first Oscar nod in the category five years ago.
Human-interest themes and child-led narratives often score with voters in the foreign-language race, and between last year’s surfeit of cinematic interest and this year’s World Cup exposure, it’s fair to say that South Africa is having a bit of a moment right now. That was my reasoning behind the prediction in May — and that was before a very valuable player entered the scene in the shape of Sony Pictures Classics.
“It is finished so soon?” asked the chipper French festival volunteer manning the theater doors as I slunk out of Hong Sangsoo’s