General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Yesterday (2004 film)

Yesterday is a 2004 South African drama film written and directed by Darrell James Roodt, shot in the Zulu language, about a rural mother diagnosed with AIDS who resolves to live long enough to see her daughter start school. It was the first international feature film made in Zulu and became South Africa's first Academy Award nominee, receiving a Best Foreign Language Film nomination at the 2005 ceremony.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Darrell James Roodt¹
Language and length	Zulu, with English subtitles; 96 minutes (some listings give 91 or 93 minutes)¹^•⁴
Lead cast	Leleti Khumalo as Yesterday; Lihle Mvelase as Beauty; Kenneth Kambule as John Khumalo; Harriet Lehabe as the teacher; Camilla Walker as the clinic doctor⁵
Producers	Anant Singh and Helena Spring, for Videovision Entertainment¹
Budget	R4 million, with R1.5 million from M-Net's eight-movie project⁶^•⁷
Oscar nomination	Best Foreign Language Film of the Year, 2005 ceremony, as South Africa's official entry³
Other honors	Peabody Award (2005); EIUC Award at the 2004 Venice Film Festival; Emmy nomination for Outstanding Made for Television Movie (2006)³^•⁸

Spoilers

Plot

Yesterday (Leleti Khumalo) lives in Rooihoek, a small village in Zululand, with her seven-year-old daughter Beauty (Lihle Mvelase). Her husband John (Kenneth Kambule) works as a miner in Johannesburg and is away for long stretches, so she manages the household largely alone.⁹ After a persistent cough, she walks to the clinic in the nearby village of Kromdraai; it takes three attempts before she is seen by the doctor (Camilla Walker), a white woman who speaks Zulu, and she learns she is HIV positive.⁹^•¹⁰

She travels to Johannesburg to tell her husband, who reacts with rage and beats her; he later returns home ill, admits he did not want to believe her, and dies shortly after Yesterday builds a separate shack where she can care for him away from the village.⁹ Facing stigma from neighbors and the local sangoma (traditional healer), who blames her illness on suppressed anger, Yesterday fixes on a single goal: to stay alive until Beauty's first day of school. The film ends with Beauty walking to class in her new uniform as Yesterday watches and then walks away down a dusty path.⁹^•²

Production

Roodt initially wrote the script in English and had it translated into Zulu.⁷ The production was led by Anant Singh's Videovision Entertainment, backed by M-Net, the National Film and Video Foundation of South Africa, and the Nelson Mandela Foundation, and was made in association with HBO Films; Roodt said the backing left him free to make the film he wanted despite the competing agendas that surround the subject of HIV/AIDS.⁷^•⁸ The Mandela Foundation's support was intended to show the reality of a country overwhelmed by HIV infection and short of resources.⁹

The film premiered in the Orizzonti sidebar at the 2004 Venice Film Festival, where it won the EIUC human rights award, and then screened at the Toronto International Film Festival.³^•¹^•⁴ It was selected as South Africa's official entry for the 77th Academy Awards, where it was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, the country's first nomination in the category.¹¹^•¹² It later received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Foreign Film, a 2006 Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Made for Television Movie, and a 2005 Peabody Award, which cited its "compassionate and hopeful exploration of personal courage in the struggle against the AIDS pandemic."³^•⁸

Themes and reception

The film is set ten years after the end of apartheid and depicts the conditions shaping the epidemic in rural KwaZulu-Natal: migrant labor that separates husbands from wives, poverty, the difficulty of reaching medical care, and the stigma attached to the disease. Its medical detail was analyzed in the journal Journal of Medicine and Movies, which noted that in South Africa women were disproportionately infected and that stigma led many people to avoid even mentioning AIDS.⁹ Scholars have read the film as a gendered narrative of the epidemic, one filled with silences, fear of disclosure, and the blaming of women as scapegoats for HIV.¹³

Reception at home and abroad diverged. South African newspapers praised the film; the Daily News called it "a triumph for local film-making that should be seen by all South Africans," and the Sunday Tribune Magazine called it the best South African feature film.¹⁴ Yet it was not a box office hit in South Africa. One academic account attributes this to its origins: written in English by a white director and aimed at independent cinemas abroad, where it was well received, it did not resonate with many of the citizens whose language and lives it depicted.¹⁵ The Forum for Traditional Healers of South Africa attacked the film for suggesting that traditional healers are uninformed about the causes and symptoms of HIV/AIDS, and critics faulted its dialogue as simplistic.¹⁴

The film has had a practical afterlife in public health. It has been used in HIV awareness campaigns, shown in rural areas to prompt discussion of HIV/AIDS, and one commentator predicted its story could become the dominant cinematic narrative of the South African epidemic.¹⁰^•¹⁶^•¹⁷ Producer Anant Singh argued that a personal story was the most effective way to engage a broad South African audience on an issue many had come to see as old news.¹⁸

Note on other films of the same name

The title Yesterday also belongs to an unrelated 2019 romantic comedy directed by Danny Boyle and written by Richard Curtis, about a musician who discovers no one else remembers the Beatles.¹⁹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026