FELL APART, RECOMBINE Kwa‐Zulu Natal, South Africa, 2009. In this rural area HIV raged to its full extent, infection numbers are amongst the highest worldwide. This is a documentary on the life in a community where traditional family care has fallen apart. How do neighbors, children, mothers and friends survive when almost an entire generation has vanished by HIV/AIDS? In a region with very little industrialization, people are forced to work hundreds of kilometers away from home. Quite often they find a new life in the city and never return. If they do come home, they bring HIV. The virus has made an already weak society even weaker. Children are growing up fast, they are left with ill parents, ageing grandparents or younger siblings. Grandparents foster the babies, but are too old to prepare them for nowadays society. A new kind of family has established itself, child headed households are beginning to be common. 5a.m., the sun is rising, Ntombi (14) is waking up. She lights the fire and prepares breakfast for her terminally ill mother Zodwa. Slowly her brother (10) is waking up, too. Their father died of AIDS two years ago. The children serve their mother’s antiretroviral ‐ARV‐ therapy conscientiously, seven pills per day, at exact times and with compulsory meals. The children finish homework and leave to school on an empty stomach. Fifteen kilometers away from them, in a tiny hut on a deserted hill, Busi (20) is waking up too. Her parents and her sister passed away, she has been the head of the family for more than three years now. She was left behind with two younger siblings, the orphan child of her older sister and two children of yet another sister that has left for a better life in Mozambique. After years of extreme poverty, she now found a boyfriend who slips her some money now and then. Three nights of unprotected sex a week is what she is forced to give in return, knowing he sees other women as well. Since then her family can go to school. It’s