Onder mijn huid

Tracy would love to tell her best friend what’s on her mind. They paint each other’s nails with henna, try to knock mangos out of the tree, and play and laugh together. Meanwhile, Tracy is secretly taking medicine for HIV, and she’s worried that she has been feeling weaker lately. Tracy promised her mother before she died that she would never tell anyone about her HIV status. Will she keep her promise, or share her secret with her best friend?

Tracy calmly tells her story in voice-over. You can’t see it from the outside, she says, and that’s a good thing, because people in her village are scared of HIV. We gradually get a picture of her life in rural Uganda, where people cook on open fires and the women go together to fetch water in jerrycans. When Tracy goes to the hospital though, she has to go alone, and that’s not easy. Should she break her promise to her mother after all?