Yesterday

I just saw Yesterday, a new movie debuting on HBO next Monday, and I gotta give props (again) to the folks over there in development. Yesterday is the story of a young S. African woman who is diagnosed with AIDS. But that’s actually not the crux of the story. It’s really about the community of women who gossip with one another, whose children play together in the fields, and have grown together as a community and how AIDS being so stigmatized in S. Africa, how it so easily and dutifully destroys all of that. It’s the first international feature film ever shot in the Zulu language and is beautifully done. The sister that stars in the film starred in Sarafina and is sumptuously sublime! With Lackawanna Blues and Sometimes In April being the brilliant films they were, it seems as if HBO may be the arbiters of cool Black independent film. Now if only they had a television series as on point, especially now with the absence of Sex & The City and Six Feet Under we need an original series and we need it today!