The New York Times - December 1, 2005
Ginia Bellafante

Through much of the film you will feel inspired to do something; by the end you will be left disheartened that any ordinary citizen, or Bono, or global initiative could ever effect the monumental changes needed to subdue a crisis whose tolls seem ever multiplying. "Orphans of Nkandla" is that rare advocacy film at once laudably dispassionate and yet so suspended in its own sense of hopelessness that you may wonder why the filmmakers went to the trouble of completing it.

More than five million people in South Africa suffer from H.I.V. or AIDS. The epidemic has left approximately one million children in the country without parents, many of them living on their own in impoverished rural areas like Nkandla, a Zulu village two hours outside the seaside resort area of Durban. The film focuses on three families in various stages of coping with illness.

In one of them, a patient and devoted 13-year old girl named Mbali must care for her 7-year-old brother after her mother dies; her father is sick but has refused to be tested for H.I.V. Such is the stigma of AIDS in South Africa that Mbali resists telling her teacher that her mother is no longer alive. Mbali understands the tragedy of her life as a series of quotidian inconveniences; her laments never assume the air of the operatic. "It's hard," she tells the filmmakers as she goes about her chores, "to get back from school and have to start cooking right away."

A second household is run by a 16-year-old boy who is caring for two nieces, Ntombi and Noxolo. Both girls lost their mothers to AIDS. In the third, a young woman, Lindiwe, who is seriously ill, struggles to raise her children, having already lost her husband.

The film is at its most powerful evoking the cultural attitudes that have laid the groundwork for the disease's seemingly unstoppable rates of transmission. Lindiwe contracted H.I.V. from her husband, who like many all over the country had spent months at a time away from home working in the gold mines outside Johannesburg. When he would return home, Lindiwe explains, he would refuse to wear a condom. "You do all kinds of senseless things in the name of marriage," she says. "There's nothing I can say because I'm just a wife."

The camera has a habit of lingering on the white-washed thatch-roof huts of Nkandla, the tall grass, red dirt and expansive sky as if to ask, How could such terrible things happen in such a lovely place? The implicit question provokes another one, less na ve, that the film doesn't seek to answer: What is South Africa, with its growing post-apartheid economy, doing to control the spread of AIDS?

By the end of "Orphans of Nkandla" the British narrator, who remains off camera, has concluded that "northern countries" must do something. Also, in the last moment, an old village woman has spoken, resigned to her claim that the children of South Africa are ruined, and that generations more will suffer. Such words can't be the final ones.

***

Orphans of Nkandla Cinemax, tonight at 7, Eastern and Pacific times; 6, Central time.

Directed and produced by Brian Woods and Deborah Shipley; Xoliswe Sithole, associate producer. For Cinemax Reel Life: Nancy Abraham, supervising producer; Sheila Nevins, executive producer.

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