HIV / AIDS Season – Screening: Living with AIDS

In Living with AIDS, Sorious Samura works as an orderly in hospital in Zambia , where the majority of the patients are HIV positive. Confronted daily with death, he describes his workplace as being like a frontline in a war zone. The staff work under horrendous conditions where protective gloves are a luxury and shrouds for the dead are stained with the blood of previous corpses.

In this film, Samura exposes the untold story of AIDS – how poverty and the complex nature of African culture and sexuality are hampering efforts to eradicate this horrifying disease.

He meets characters like Joshua and Lawson who continue to practice unprotected sex despite their HIV positive status, and Precious and Nancy, AIDS orphans who fend for themselves in a world where sex “flesh to flesh” pays well and offers an easy short term solution.

Samura also meets heroines such as Bitonda, who at sixteen is in sole charge of her dying 14 year old brother, an AIDS orphaned cousin as well as her own child.

After one month, Samura is left with the realisation that for the war against HIV in Africa to be won, poverty, ignorance and African sexual attitudes have to be tackled head on.

Length: 52 mins