'Angels in the Dust': A Documentary Too Moving to Wither

Lillian is a bright kid with an infectious grin and she decides toward the end of "Angels in the Dust," a documentary set in a South African orphanage, that she needs an HIV test.

This is remarkably sound and courageous judgment on her part. She appears to be about 10 years old, but her dad is dead, her mom is HIV-positive and she was raped before she came to the orphanage.

So Marion Cloete, the orphanage director and ostensible subject of the film, goes to Lillian's mom to ask permission. What results is a four-star screaming match in which Lillian's mother threatens to poison her daughter -- and the rest of her children for good measure -- if Lillian is given the test.

I would like to say that is the most awful, wrenching moment in this heartbreaking film. But that would mean discounting the scene in which another young orphanage resident, 15-year-old Virginia, goes back to visit her mom, who had turned her into a pre-pubescent beer-hall prostitute, a practice that led to her contracting HIV and coming to the orphanage "covered with pus." And it would mean giving short shift to the scene that left tears streaming down my face, in which Cloete recounts a young girl a few hours from death asking if Cloete, or her brother, or anyone could come with her when she dies.

No, says Cloete, explaining to the child that God gives each person their own song to sing.

"Does this mean my song is over?" Cloete remembers the young girl weeping.

Cloete, who has been doing this for nearly 20 years, recounts it as the single most traumatic death she has witnessed.

If you're still reading, then you will be moved, if not stunned, by this straightforward, unadorned example of filmmaking. Director Louise Hogarth uses no voice-over narration, no real narrative device to move the story along. She just turned on the camera in 2004 and spent a large chunk of the next two years following Cloete on her duties, which range from playing with children to loading bodies in the mortuary into coffins and then into the back of a pickup.

Cloete is a remarkable character in her own right, and she's in almost every scene. She, her husband and two daughters left their comfortable home in Johannesburg to establish a 99-acre orphanage and school. It's called Boikarabelo, about an hour north of Johannesburg, on the high veld, with its long brown grasses and hills in the distance.

In addition to being a university-trained therapist, Cloete is the owner and manager of the place. She's white, and all of her 550 charges are black. The film does not address this in any way, which is a shame. Race and the overlay of colonialism and apartheid are palpable facts in southern Africa and play out in different ways among whites and blacks. The former are far more well-off, not greatly affected by the AIDS crisis and regard the disease in fairly straightforward terms, while blacks are dying at some of the highest rates ever recorded, and cultural beliefs about the disease carry far more fear, dread and fatalism.

But given the press of death and poverty here, the race factor is relatively minor. The film is riveting in its selection of characters. There is Thabo, sick with AIDS to the point where he vomits on screen, but who still manages to date and fatally infect every girlfriend he has. There is Virginia. And most touchingly, there is Lillian, whom you can't help but cheer for.

The movie makes you care deeply about the people you're watching, and that is what great cinema does, even if this documentary is not, technically speaking, great cinema. Its achievement is the raw emotional power, delivered without sentiment or manipulation, of impoverished children facing what remains of their lives with courage and honesty.

Angels in the Dust (95 minutes at Landmark's E Street Cinema) is not rated. In English and various South African languages with subtitles. Contains mature themes, scenes of illness, a corpse under a sheet, people dying. Director Louise Hogarth is scheduled to host a question-and-answer session after the 7:30 screening tonight.