e'Lollipop, the feel-good cult film about a friendship between two young boys - one black, the other white - in the racially divided South Africa of the 1970s, is to make a grand return to the screen soon at the Cannes Film Festival in France.
And the movie's two stars, Norman Knox, who plays the part of Jannie, and Muntu Ndebele, who is Tsepo in the film, will be there, too.
The bosom friends of the film's warm-hearted fiction back in the days when apartheid was at its height have taken very different paths in the past 30 years.
Knox, 39, is a Gauteng entrepreneur. Forty-three-year-old Ndebele, who lives in Midrand, is unemployed, having nearly lost his life to crime and drugs.
The real South Africa has a harsher story line than the film that made them, briefly, famous.
The primary irony of the film - premiered around the world a year before the bloody Soweto uprising - was that the scenes of feel-good humanity in the relationship between Tsepo and Jannie as they were played out on a mountain top in Lesotho were not only unheard of but officially discouraged in South Africa.
Yet, even critically minded activists have acknowledged the touching quality of the film.
Producer and creator of e'Lollipop Andre Pieterse said: "We always knew that we had created something very special in e'Lollipop."
The film is to open a South African Retrospective section at Cannes.
Jackie Motsepe, marketing manager for the National Film and Video Foundation, said South African film makers were asked to submit films for Cannes. She said e'Lollipop was chosen from hundreds of other films because it was an enchanting film.
"It epitomises a slice of South African life and is a very well-made film that was very popular during its time."
Pieterse, director of MA Africa Films, recalled that it was "a challenge" in the South Africa of the 1970s to produce a film that featured a black and white boy as best friends.
"We were prepared to make the movie, irrespective of the fact that it risked being banned," he said.
He remembers screenings of the film for several political leaders of the time. The movie was approved.
"No scene was cut. Those were my conditions at that time."
The film got its title from the first scene in which the two boys meet and share a lollipop.
"A lollipop started the friendship. In fact e'Lollipop is a symbol of friendship that prevails," Pieterse said.
Because of its heart-warming message of friendship and love, the movie won audiences all over the world.
"The film was released in the United States and Canada by Universal pictures under the name Forever young, forever free," said Pieterse. "In the rest of the world the film was released by Warner Brothers."
Interviewed during a visit to Cape Town on Tuesday Knox recalled his part in the movie, and how he got to play it: "I played a little white boy who was orphaned and landed up in a remote mission station in the Lesotho hills."
He was only 10 at the time. "I was sitting at my desk at school when some people walked into the classroom and picked kids out of the class. I thought, 'What have I done now again!"
The visitors turned out to be talent scouts, and Knox was invited to a casting.
"It was great fun to be part of e'Lollipop. There were so many special moments in the film," he said. The film was really about "true friendship".
And, indeed, it's a true friendship that has endured.
Ndebele, who, as Tsepo in the film, gives his life to save the character played by Knox, is indebted in real life to Pieterse and Knox, who have helped him kick his alcohol and drug addiction.
"I thank God they found me," Ndebele said. "For the past three years I don't drink, smoke or do drugs, nothing."
He says e'Lollipop as showing that "despite our colour and creed, sacrifice and friendship are the true values of life".
There was a time when e'Lollipop held out the prospect of a life of glittering success.
"We were stars," he said, remembering the premier in Australia in 1975. "We walked on red carpets and met people like Ringo Starr."
Now, he "can't wait to go to Cannes". It's "a dream come true".
"This is a once in a lifetime opportunity, especially after I nearly lost my life to crime and drugs. I never thought I'd be back in the spotlight," Ndebele said.
The excitement is no less intense for his screen partner, and helper in life, Knox.
"The reality of going to Cannes is starting to sink in now," he said, adding: "It's an honour to represent South Africa."
Later this year MA Afrika Films will release e'Lollipop on DVD and video.
A percentage of the sales of the film is to go to various children's charities.