A Year Towards Tomorrow

Did you ever watch any of those 1960s American sci-fi films set in desert terrain where the female characters were always over-dressed? Well this starts off with two “VISTA” gals heading turning up to chop wood dressed in twin-set and heels. It’s that hilarious scene that rather sets the tone for this pretty condescending look at how some of the country’s poverty stricken minorities can be helped with a bit of goodwill and some cooking lessons. A sense of irony isn’t wasted as they head to help a Navajo community that would have been successfully self-sufficient until the white man invaded their lands and then confned them to unsustainable reservations where they promptly lost many of the skills that had enabled them to have been hitherto completely independent. Now, a well meaning graduate is offering to teach them how to cook and they have to learn English. Some lively African American children also find themselves the beneficiaries of VISTA assistance, though that resonates a little more with many of these children (or their mother’s) unsure of their own age or parentage and so thus excluded from benefits available to everyone - like schooling! It is very easy to be cynical about documentaries like this. The production is poor, the narration (from Paul Newman, no less) can sound terribly patronising and there is something unpleasantly, if unintentionally, superior about the underpinning attitude here. Luckily, the lass who could not chop wood to save her life at the start ends up being the axe-wielding equivalent of “Woody Woodpecker” by the end, so nobody is going to freeze!