Yesterday
by Darrell James Roodt
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Leleti KhumaloDirector: Darrell James Roodt
Brand: HBO Home Video
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Spanish (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; English (Published), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.78:1
Running Time: 96 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-01-10
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Model: 92648
Studio: Hbo Home Video
Movie Reviews of Yesterday
Movie Review: Yesterday puts a human face on the African Epidemic
Summary: 5 Stars
"Yesterday" opens with a long slow camera pan over South African Desert. When it seemed too long I looked at the timer on the DVD player and 3 1/2 minutes had passed - just a camera passing across the desert. Then the camera picks up two lone figures walking up the road, a young black mother and her child. They pass two women who ask them how far it is to their village. "We've been walking over two hours", the young woman says. She clearly has far to walk still.
The woman finally arrives at her destination - to get in line to see a Doctor who comes to the neighboring village once a week. Although she has walked for hours, and has the return walk ahead of her, she is told that she is too late. A man comes up to interrupt the Doctor's line - about 20 patients ahead of her. Then I got it. The long opening camera shot was designed to give me, the comfortable viewer, some sense of the uncomfortable nature of life in these African villages. Although the woman had walked through the desert for hours she was too late - and the Doctor wouldn't be returning for a week. I felt ashamed at being annoyed by the opening 3 1/2 minute shot of the desert. Director Darrell Roodt had me. The director of the acclaimed "Cry, the Beloved Country" returns with another story that must be told about his native South Africa.
The young mother was "Yesterday", played by Leleti Khumalo of "Hotel Rwanda", and she was leading her daughter "Beauty", played by Lihle Mvelase. Yesterday is a Zulu, and Roodt makes the film ring true by having the entire film in Zulu, so a warning to those who hate to read subtitles or don't speak Zulu.
It dawns on us that Yesterday has some awful disease - from her coughing at night I at first thought she might have T.B. but we learn that the news is perhaps even worse. Her husband (in a brief but effective performance by Kenneth Khambula), on one of his rare trips home from the Johannesburg mines, has infected her with H.I.V.
The film never gets preachy. There are scenes of heart-warming compassion - such as the teacher in her village (played well by Harriet Lenabe) probably only slightly better off financially than impoverished Yesterday, who offers to watch Beauty so that Yesterday can get to the weekly Doctor visit in time in the village on the other side of that long walk we see in the opening scene, then secretly hires a taxi to carry Yesterday even more quickly. There are also scenes full of painful anguish - with perhaps none worse than the scene where Yesterday tracks down her husband at the mine to give him the news.
We don't get to see pharmaceutical companies and governments and whatever decisions go into making treatment for AIDS available or, perhaps more importantly, affordable. We get to see a compassionate Doctor (played by Camilla Walker), strapped for resources, who tries to help hundreds of patients. We get to see the villagers who live around Yesterday's hut, and how their growing fear and resentment make Yesterday and her husband outcasts when it becomes clear that they had AIDS.
Yesterday's only hope is that she will live long enough to see Beauty begin school. My hope is that growing awareness will make fewer Yesterdays.
Summary of Yesterday
YESTERDAY - DVD MovieAs beautiful as it is heartbreaking, the Oscar®-nominated drama Yesterday brings an intimate human perspective to the AIDS crisis in Africa. On the surface, it's a harsh and devastating story about bad things happening to good people, but such a limited description robs the film of its warmth and tender compassion. Best known for his 1995 drama Cry the Beloved Country, director Darrell James Roodt returns to his native South Africa for this moving and heartfelt portrait of a young, devoted mother named Yesterday (played by Leleti Khumalo, from Hotel Rwanda) who learns that she is HIV positive, and remains determined to stay alive until her young daughter Beauty (Lihle Mvelase) is old enough to go off to school. Her husband (Kenneth Khambula) is also stricken with AIDS, and Yesterday cares for him even as they are ostracized by fearful neighbors in their tiny Zulu village. One might expect a film about AIDS to be terribly depressing, and Roodt pulls no punches when conveying the emotional anguish of Yesterday's dilemma. But Yesterday is so visually beautiful in terms of its physical and spiritual landscape (it was filmed in the expansive KwaZulu-Natal region of South Africa) that it's universally appealing, and the score by Madale Kunene adds just the right emotional seasoning to the film's ethnic roots. Anyone with a beating heart can relate to Yesterday's plight as a caring wife and mother, and Khumalo's performance is so lovely that she lights up the screen, even (and perhaps especially) during Yesterday's darkest hours. Without pounding on its point, Yesterday puts a human face on a global crisis that's too often viewed on impersonal terms. --Jeff Shannon
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