¶ … 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...

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…