Yesterday
HBO, tonight at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.
Written
and directed by Darrell James Roodt; Sudhir Pragjee and Sanjeev Singh,
executive producers. Produced by Anant Singh and Helena Spring.
WITH: Leleti Khumalo
(Yesterday), Lihle Mvelase (Beauty), Kenneth Kambule (John Khumalo),
Harriet Lehabe (teacher), Camilla Walker (doctor), Mmoni Moabi (second
teacher), Nandi Nyembe (Village Sangoma, or healer).
Two articles on 'Yesterday' via NYTimes:
'Yesterday'
If Tomorrow Never Comes
By NEIL GENZLINGER
Published: November 27, 2005
THE numbers generally used to describe the AIDS crisis in Africa are
overwhelming -millions infected with H.I.V., thousands dying each day -
but for his film "Yesterday," Darrell James Roodt decided to focus on
what can be the most compelling number of all: one. The movie, which
has its American television premiere Monday on HBO, tells the quiet,
sobering story of one woman and one child. The woman, a villager in
Zululand, South Africa, whose father named her Yesterday (because
"things were better yesterday than today"), slowly comes to the
realization that she has contracted AIDS from her husband - the fate of
many women on the continent. Her struggles to get medical help and her
fears for the future of her young daughter give a human element to the
crisis that often gets lost in the news accounts. [read on...]
TV Review | 'Yesterday'
Brave Spirit Under the Unsheltering Sky
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: November 28, 2005
Trailers for the HBO film "Yesterday" are both true and totally
misleading. Blurbs describing "the transcendent power" of one woman's
"courage and compassion" conjure "Oprah Winfrey
Presents" or worse, the movie "Beaches." And while "Yesterday" is, in
fact, a tribute to the transcendent power of one rural South African
woman who confronts H.I.V. with courage and compassion, it is more than
that.
"Yesterday" is proof that even the saddest stories can be told
simply, with intelligence and grace and without falling into mawkish
bathos. It also happens to be beautifully made. The story rolls out
like the endless dirt road that awaits its heroine on her circular trek
between village and clinic. The vast African sky fills the screen,
ending in the sculptured mountainscape of a remote horizon across the
veld. The numinous beauty of that timeless, empty Eden is marred by
only one thing: a string of rusty, sharp-toothed barbed wire that
constricts the people within.
Leleti Khumalo,
a South African actress who was the star of the play and movie
"Sarafina!," portrays Yesterday. The heroine's name is also the film's
mournful leitmotif. When a doctor expresses surprise, saying she has
known people named Today and Tomorrow, but not Yesterday, her patient
shyly explains that her father named her that because he felt that
"things were better yesterday than they are today." Yesterday chose to
call her own daughter Beauty (Lihle Mvelase), but she herself is all
too well named: a woman who, under a death sentence of H.I.V., is
vanishing into memory.
"Yesterday" delivers a powerful message
about AIDS in Africa, but it also serves as a signpost in the
ascendance of television over movies. Hollywood keeps hedging its
big-budget bets on movies aimed at the young and incurious, so serious
films are increasingly rare and ever more simplistic.
[...]
"Yesterday" provides a small, unusual look at the global tragedy of
H.I.V. and other diseases ravaging Africa and other parts of the third
world. The seemingly inexorable spread of malaria, tuberculosis and
H.I.V. ebbs and flows as a remote, unimaginable calamity in newspaper
headlines, benefit concerts and United Nations conferences. More than a
million South Africans have died of AIDS, while experts say that as
many as five million of them are infected with H.I.V., and women are
now about three times more likely than men to become infected. Only a
tiny fraction of those receive antiretroviral medication.
The film, which was partly sponsored by Nelson Mandela and the Nelson Mandela Foundation, focuses not on the statistics of millions but on the tragedy of one death. [read on...]
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