Channel24 reports that South African actress Khomotso Manyaka has made a Time magazine list of “Best performances of 2011’ for her role as Chanda in acclaimed local film Life, Above All.
Manyaka is mentioned third on the list of female performances which is topped by Meryl Streep for The Iron Lady and the female cast (Octavia Spencer, Viola Davis, Emma Stone, Bryce Dallas Howard and Jessica Chastain) of The Help.
“There’s no explaining the magic of child actors; somehow they get the trick of communicating through their characters to the camera,’ says Time magazine.
The magazine continues to say that Manyaka “invested the part of Chanda, the sole strength of her ravaged clan, with amazing poise, delicacy and grit’.
They also note that she was “just a 12-year-old South African girl who had never acted, when director Oliver Schmitz picked her for the lead role in this starkly poignant drama about a family, a village and a people devastated by the AIDS plague’.
Life, Above All received a 10 minute standing ovation when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010.
