Available on DVD: “Life, Above All”

Life, Above All, a grave and quietly moving story about a South African girl of extraordinary character, does something that few painful dramas accomplish: It tells a tale of resilience without platitudes about the triumph of the human spirit or without false promises about an unclouded future. The battle fought by its 12-year-old heroine, who struggles to save her family and best friend from prejudiced neighbors who often look like a mob, may be over when the movie comes to its stirring close, but there’s no end to the fight.

That’s partly because the movie is dedicated to children orphaned by AIDS. (In a 2010 annual report Unicef puts the number of such South African orphans at an appalling 1.9 million.) But the sense that this story doesn’t end when the movie does, and that what unfolds on screen flows into the world beyond, is due to how the director Oliver Schmitz has approached this tricky material. Schmitz first attracted notice in 1987 with Mapantsula, a gangster film that made the festival rounds. He went on to direct another gangster movie, a documentary and television projects, experience that seems to have served him well for Life, Above All, which is at the intersection of fact and fiction.

The girl, Chanda (the self-possessed newcomer Khomotso Manyaka), takes over the movie as soon as you see her, standing near her weeping mother, Lillian (Lerato Mvelase), in their dark, shabby home in a township near Johannesburg. Chanda’s newborn sister, Sara, has just died, perhaps of complications from AIDS, leaving Lillian bereft and Chanda in charge of the burial and, it soon emerges, everything else, her surviving younger sister and brother included. Dry eyed, determined, she marches to a funeral parlor where she’s shown a tiny coffin that, she’s assured, will make the infant look pretty. Chanda wordlessly scans the room, her eyes falling on the metal table where the dead are prepared.

Chanda’s silence is unnerving, as is the absence of tears, and while her calm conveys a preternatural strength of character it also suggests a lifetime of pain. No child, you think, should have to pick out her baby sister’s coffin. But she does, taking in the horror of the funeral home and its metal table without flinching and then pushing forward, still dry eyed, still determined, taking on life with an appealing (and enviable) toughness and grace that make this difficult story not just bearable but also absorbing. As the weight of the world bears down on her slender frame, she becomes the movie’s moral compass and its authentic wonder: the child who is forced to be an adult yet remains childlike enough to feel real.

Based on Chanda’s Secrets, a 2004 novel by the Canadian writer Allan Stratton, and adapted for the screen by Schmitz and Dennis Foon, the movie throws plenty at her, including a drunk of a stepfather, gossipy neighbors and devastating illness. Taken together, her tribulations have the makings of bathetic melodrama. But Schmitz, shooting in hand-held digital, gives the story a suitable, effective visual and narrative grittiness. The colors are golden but never honeyed, and the same could be said of the movie’s prevailing worldview. (The cinematographer Bernhard Jasper knows how to shoot and light for black skin: faces never melt into shadows, as sometimes happens in more careless films.) There’s ugliness here, trash in the streets, violence in the people, but these are just facets of Chanda’s world rather than the sum of it.

The episodic story follows Chanda (the camera tagging after her) as she busily tries to hold her family together while keeping an eye on her best friend, Esther (Keaobaka Makanyane), and the snooping neighbors (including a fine Harriet Manamela as the complicated Mrs. Tafa). A pretty child with a prepubescent body and a face that sometimes looks frighteningly old, Esther lives alone in a small shack behind her family’s abandoned house. Her parents are both dead because of AIDS, and her brothers and sisters now live elsewhere. She has a wide, heartbreaking smile that belies her pariah status in a community where the fear of AIDS fuels fear, cruelty and worse. The only kindness shown her comes from Chanda, who promises never to leave her. The world has abandoned Esther, but Chanda is holding her tight.