Yesterday is haunted by ignorance. While AIDS ravages sub-Saharan Africa, the distressing reality of the pandemic is still largely unknown by millions of people. Women like Yesterday who is doing her best to raise a young daughter, Beauty, in a remote South African village. It is stunningly beautiful country in which the film opens quietly, almost unmoving, as the camera scans for two tiny figures walking through the dry grassland. Yesterday has a persistent cough and is heading for the nearest medical clinic, a half-day journey by foot. She arrives too late to see a doctor. It’s a simple scene that underlines the scope of Yesterday and the truth of village life, so divorced from our every day as to be unimaginable. Reluctant to make the journey a third time, she accepts a friend’s generosity and takes a bus, and learns she is HIV+.

It’s a painful moment stunningly captured by Leleti Khumalo’s effortless performance. She carries the film with immense dignity. Aware of the social and mortal consequences of the disease, Yesterday was ill-equipped to prevent contracting it: she and the rest of her village maintain a medieval view of HIV. Visiting her husband in the mines near Johannesburg, he beats her for her trouble. When he returns too ill to work and ostracized by the village, Yesterday cares for him and resolves to change the future: if nothing else, she will live until Beauty starts school. The compassionate touch of director Roodt humanizes characters beyond ciphers with a mix of resilient simplicity and sincerity. It is an achingly heartfelt production and Yesterday’s stoic refusal to feel sorrow or pity makes her suffering even more upsetting. “I’m not brave,” she said, “it’s just the way things are”.

// COLIN FRASER