Danser sur le fil Série-Collection : Steps for the future

Karen Boswall
2001 - 41 min - Beta numérique - Couleur - Afrique du Sud, France

This is a house hold of women living in a Northern Mozambican city, where the father is away all but 4 day a month, working on a prawn trawler off the coast. The mother Antonietta, volunteer as an AIDS activist, counselling others on HIV. The entire family as HIV positive, except for one daughter. What will happen to her ?
The story begins when Antonietta takes her healthy daughter on a two days journey to a remote countryside village for an initiation rite, where the daughter will be taught the secret art of sexuality.
At the end of this week of ritual, practice and moral lessons on how to please a man, the daughter will become a woman in the eyes of society and at the same time be put at risk like her mother to become HIV positive. The mother is confronted by the fact that while there are benefits to what she is teaching her daughter, it is also a death sentence.
Here is a story of a modern African woman struggles in herself between the knowledge of a modern disease and the traditional rules of female behaviour. What will win out ? Will she sacrifice her daughter to the pressure of traditional society ?