Starring Khomotso Manyaka and Harriet Lenabe. In Sotho with English subtitles. Rated PG. Opens Friday, July 22, at the International Village Cinemas

Poverty is a killer, but ignorance is even more deadly. That’s one of the main messages of Life, Above All, a poignant and ultimately uplifting look inside the hidden world of post-liberation townships in South Africa.

The story, told in the Sotho language, centres on 12-year-old Chanda, played by radiant newcomer Khomotso Manyaka. Stuck in a dusty outpost with relatively few prospects, this formerly strong student is now facing multiple challenges. Her own father is long dead, and her frequently drunken stepdad only shows up to pilfer family food money. Now her mom (Lerato Mvelase) is sick and getting worse. With two younger kids from the ne’er-do-well dad, and a baby that just died, the family is floundering. They are helped by a neighbour (the memorable Harriet Lenabe) with middle-class aspirations: she has a phone and a car. But the woman encourages Chanda to lie about her mother’s illness because a whiff of AIDS brings shame on the household and panic in the surrounding streets.

At the same time, the girl is told to drop her best friend (Keaobaka Makanyane), already orphaned by the disease and recently seen hanging around unsavoury truck stops. Hemmed in by suspicion, gossip, and unspoken threats, Chanda must take matters into her own hands or lose everything.

Remarkably, even when it drifts toward melodrama, her struggle never smacks of after-school-special generalities, nor does it wallow in sensationalistic horrors. This finely modulated and beautifully photographed film was directed by German South African Oliver Schmitz (Mapantsula) and written—rather unexpectedly—by Vancouverite Dennis Foon, adapting a novel by fellow Canadian Allan Stratton. Usually, such a mashup of outside forces will blunt a tale’s particularity, but here the geography of flawed yet hopeful souls is just about perfect.

Watch the trailer for Life, Above All.