I have no idea why HBO Films never gave Yesterday any sort of real theatrical distribution or why they’ve essentially buried its cable network premiere on a Monday night, post-Thanksgiving. If you have HBO and you’re not sure what you’re doing tonight, stay home and at 9 PM watch this incredibly powerful, moving and intense film that looks at AIDS in Africa from a perspective most Americans likely never consider. I saw the film earlier this year because it received nominations for Best Foreign Language Feature for the IFP Spirit Awards. (I wrote briefly about it here — scroll down to “Best Foreign Film.” The only reason it didn’t receive my top vote is because it was competing with Pedro Almodovar’s brilliant Bad Education.) In fact, it also was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar. It won neither with the good but vastly overrated The Sea Inside taking both (as well as the Golden Globe).
Yesterday is a movie that should be required viewing, especially for those of us who live in what ultimately is the very isolated (and often selfish) United States. The Constant Gardner (one of my favorite films so far of 2005) is a good examination of how the pharmaceutical drug industry takes advantage of poverty-stricken African countries, but in Yesterday we see how other parts of Africa are completely ignored. The film tells the story of a woman named Yesterday who lives with her young daughter in a Zulu village with no electricity or running water. When she develops a cough, she has to walk many miles to the nearest village with a clinic. The lines to see the doctor — who is only there once a week — are so long that by late morning, people are turned away, as is Yesterday, having to wait another week and make the long journey back from her village only to potentially get turned away again. Yesterday’s husband, meanwhile, is working in Johannesburg simply trying to get by and sending what money he can home.
When Yesterday finally gets to see a doctor, she learns that she’s HIV positive. She travels to see and tell her husband who of course takes the very reasonable stance of blaming and beating her. Of course, he has it too — she contracted it from him — and eventually is lucky that his wife’s nature is much kinder than his. The family is someone shunned by the rest of the otherwise very friendly village, but these are people who don’t know or can’t learn about this disease the way many of us have been educated by it. Yesterday is determined, however, to send her young daughter to school and get an education, and she won’t allow herself to succumb to the disease until that has happened. There isn’t the money to put all the victims of HIV and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa on anti-retrovirals. In a Zulu village with no nearby hospitals, there is no “living with HIV,” even in the modern day. It is still a death sentence.
Choire Sicha’s NY Observer piece “Chitty Chitty Bang, Rent“ (UPDATED: “archival link” here, per Choire.) takes a look at how now only did the AIDS crisis in this country not really end in the late-90s but also how Rent, especially in its new movie incarnation (which believe me, that rant is on its way this week for sure!), completely distorts and rewrites the history of people afflicted with HIV and AIDS at the time. It’s a fantastic article, but in this great big world of ours, it’s still just a microcosm; it’s really just the experience in our own backyard. Yesterday, thanks to its beautiful, never overdone, preachy or overdramatic filmmaking, gives us a look at the world on the other side of the tracks. It would be horrifying one if not for the fact that at the end of the day, as sad and tragic as it is, Yesterday proves to be such a sympathetic character of strength and love that in its own way, the outcome provides a sense of hope, that maybe the next generation will be able to learn and advance and help make their corner of the world a little better. Of course, chances are they won’t be able to without the help of countries like ours, and the awareness that a great, meaningful and entertaining film like Yesterday can bring to this issue should be given more support and a larger platform.
If you miss it tonight on HBO, it will of course be available on HBO On Demand for some period of time. Make sure not to miss it.
Out of Focus 