YESTERDAY d: Darrell Roodt

Yesterday (2004)
Direction and screenplay: Darrell Roodt
Cast: Leleti Khumalo, Lihle Mvelase, Kenneth Kambule, Harriet Lehabe, Camilla Walker
 

 
To date, nowhere has the AIDS pandemic been felt more strongly than in Sub-Saharan Africa, home to approximately 10% of the world population and to more than 70% of the planet’s 40 million AIDS cases. In the past twenty-five years, it is estimated that more than 20 million Sub-Saharan Africans have died from complications of the disease. Even today, drug cocktails that are relatively accessible in other parts of the globe are still beyond the means of the vast majority of Africans.
Writer-director Darrell Roodt’s South African drama Yesterday is set in this catastrophic scenario. The film depicts the effects of AIDS in the life [...]

Toronto Film Festival 2004: African Cinema

Besides the usual Planet Africa program, which presents five features and eight shorts, the 2004 Toronto Film Festival is offering a look at South African cinema. The five features presented in the sidebar South Africa: Ten Years Later are Red Dust, the Zulu-language Yesterday (directed by Darrell Roodt), Drum, Cape of Good Hope, and Forgiveness.
Film topics range from the bleak (AIDS in Yesterday) and the political (the fight against Apartheid in Drum) to the uplifting (the bond created among humans through their love of animals in Cape of Good Hope).
Other African films to be presented at the festival include Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene’s La Noire de … (Black Girl), which was first released in 1966 and is widely [...]