Like many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Uganda has been greatly affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In the year 2012 alone, acording to that year’s UNAIDS report, more than sixty thousand Ugandans died of AIDS, leaving behind countless numbers of orphans, many of them still very young. Because of this situation, numerous mothers living with HIV have decided to write what they call “memory books” in order to prepare and help their children cope with their eventual death. For each child, they recall in writing how they gave birth, their memories of the child as a baby, stories about the father, and so on. They include family pictures, drawings, tales, and stories. They also express wishes for the child’s future. Through this process, mother and child create actual memories, too, as the mother compiles the book with the child by her side. Each step is an opportunity to spend precious moments together, to be close and bond. At the end, both mother and child can better come to terms with the disease and its deadly consequence.

According to the UNAIDS report, sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 69 percent of all people living with HIV. Thus the documentary attempts to thematize how Africans living with the virus have come up with their own ways of dealing with their condition. The film’s protagonists are Christine, Harriet, Elisabeth, and Betty, four mothers writing memory books, and Dennis and Chrissi, two orphan siblings whose parents died of AIDS. Christine, a nurse at the Iganga Hospital in charge of announcing HIV tests results to patients, explains: “HIV does not kill quickly, but if you lack love, support, family or if you are in denial, it can. People used to commit suicide when they learned that they were HIV positive, because the mentality of the country associates the virus with sexual immorality.”

Indeed, in spite of the high prevalence of the disease on the continent, HIV/AIDS remains an affliction that still carries considerable social stigma. The memory books play a veritable therapeutic function for those directly and indirectly affected by the disease. For instance, when Dennis reads his memory book with his sister, he tells her that their mother used to say that the book would help. Now that their mother is dead, he understands how it helps them remember the good things they used to do together. According to the film, the Memory Book project was expected to reach ten million African children by 2010, with forty thousand women writing memory books. This admirable initiative encourages Africans living with HIV to accept their status and better prepare for the inevitable.

Unfortunately, however, Christa Graf’s directing and narrative approach do not do sufficient justice to this important subject matter. On the film’s Web site the producer , Jörg Bundschuh, says that “This film requires something from the viewer. But it also gives a lot. . . . It is a journey to the heart of Africa that brings you very close to the people” (www.memorybooks-film.de). But actually it does not. Somehow Memory Books lacks the warmth and compassion toward its protagonists that would truly humanize them and enable the viewer to sympathize with them. Instead, Graf chooses a rather cold narrative style that creates distance from the characters. The film has no voiceover, no intertitles to present and fill in the blanks about each character: we do not know their age, or for how long they have been living with the disease; it does not set up the background with necessary information about Uganda and how it is affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Graf does not even explicitly explain what a memory book is, or how it has become a groundbreaking initiative to deal with the disease. Instead, viewers are left that would decipher much on their own and remain deprived of the most basic information that would enable them to fully appreciate the story.

The movie concludes disappointingly as well, with no sense of closure, no epilogue to tell what happened to the protagonists and how their situation has evolved since the end of filming. When Jörg Bundschuh adds that the film shows “that Africans are, by our standards, coping with this problem in a very atypical and even exemplary way,” he also reveals how the filmmakers approached their subject matter according to European/Western standards. In spite of their noble intentions, Memory Books becomes a film that looks and feels just like yet another uninspired TV documentary focusing on “Africa and its many problems.”