Yesterday

Yesterday takes us to a remote village in South Africa’s Zululand. This film tackles one of the biggest epidemics in the region. South Africa has world’s worst AIDS epidemic. The story centers on a mother named Yesterday who lives with her daughter Beauty in a remote village called Rooihoek. Yesterday is hit with the news that she has the HIV virus. We watch as Yesterday’s village turns its back on Yesterday and her also infected husband. This is a story of a woman’s courage, strength and determination to not let the disease get the best of her.

As we examine the AIDS epidemic in South Africa we see startling numbers. At the end of 2007 there were 5.7 million people in South Africa that had HIV. There are also 1,000 AIDS deaths that happen in one day. This film shows the fast need for education on the HIV virus. We see in the film that people are very uneducated when it comes to contracting the disease. Villagers think that just being in the same village they will get the disease too. Also they seemed uneducated on condom use in the film. South Africa’s population is actually on the decline because of the epidemic.

There was an area in the film that I thought had some irony in it. Yesterday had the HIV virus and yet she seemed to be hanging in there and battling the illness. She seemed to have a focused positive frame of mind. On the other hand, Yesterday’s husband seemed to fade quickly after becoming sick. I thought it was interesting how he was the bad guy and he got hit harder by the illness. He was the one that was sleeping around and he was very unwelcome to his wife’s news of the illness when he beat her. It was a sign of bad karma when he came crawling back to his wife in terrible shape.

Yesterday does a great job a raising attention to a very serious social issue. Possibly this film is just what this region needed, a main stream media learning tool to teach awareness on this devastating disease. I liked how they filmed the movie in the rural areas. This shows that even the people who live in the rural areas who are married can be still susceptible to the deadly disease.