Film: \"Yesterday\" the Award Winning Film Yesterday

¶ … Film: "Yesterday"

The award winning film Yesterday succeeds in dealing with a sensitive and complex issue in a way that is both instructive and emotionally enticing and cogent. The film deals with the proliferation HIV / AIDS in one of the epicenters of this disease in South Africa. This film, which was nominated for an Oscar award for the best foreign language film in 2005, is intense and gripping and captures the pathos and tragedy of this disease in the way that it affects and destroys the life and happiness of a young rural woman and her family.

Set in the bleak but cinematically entrancing rural Natal region of South Africa, the film reflects the complex and damaging effects of HIV on the life of ordinary people in South Africa, who are also suffering in the aftermath of the Apartheid system. This refers to the fact that the men cannot find work in the rural African homelands and are forced to work in the mines in cities like Johannesburg. This system not only destroys family and cultural life and also brings the evil of AIDS into the rural areas, when the husbands visit their wives. Another social factor that is also explored in the film is the cultural disparities in gender roles and the subservient role of the woman.

The film focuses on the struggle of a poor HIV-positive mother who has to raise her child while her husband, who also has contracted the disease, is away in the mines. The difficulty of her life is stressed at the very outset of the film by the long distances that she has to walk to the local medical clinic, only to be turned away time and again because of the long lines of people waiting for attention.

Illiterate and uneducated she has no inkling of what is causing her illness. When she finds that she has contracted the HIV virus she is confused and cannot relate to a disease for which there is no social or cultural precedent. In essence she has to prepare for the harsh reality of not only the death of her husband who returns from the mines in the final stages of AIDS, but also her own inevitable death from the disease and the future of her child.

On a cultural level, the film explores the lack of knowledge and understanding about the reality of AIDS in the community, which is still prevalent in many traditional communities today. For example, when the other villages in Yesterday's community find out that she and her husband have HIV / AIDS, they believe that they can contract the disease just being in the presence of the infected person and they ostracize Yesterday and her family. At an earlier stage of the narrative, Yesterday's husband, who is the unknowing carrier of the disease, beats up his wife when she tells him about the reality of their situation. The suggestion is that on a cultural level he is insulted and confused by an assertion of this nature. These events in the film stress the cultural refusal to deal with this pernicious disease. The film also makes clear that this refusal is born out of fear and a lack of knowledge.

In the end Yesterday buries her husband. She must face the stark reality of her future with terminal AIDS as she watches her child go to school. The sense of pathos and sympathy that pervades the film is never cloying but rather brings the viewer to an intense awareness of the reality of this disease and the cultural and social problems that surround it.