It is usually the fictional film that is credited with the greatest ability for depicting the travails of a believer trying to extract, in vain, the meagerest reaction from a distant, mute, and deaf God. Elvis Sabin Ngaïbino's documentary evokes a hint of the darkness and violence of feeling in Bergman’s great films about the silence of God, but, here, the backdrop of a secular Europe where religion persists more as a cultural relic is replaced by a traditional African space, where the faith of the colonizer has merged with various guises of local mysticism into a strange and particularly enduring hybrid. This is the context in which Reine and Rodrigue, parents to three children, struggle on a day-to-day basis not only to make a living but to cope with and hide the disease that is eating away at them both: HIV. In this ordeal, the fiery, almost militant Catholicism they preach and profess is both a form of support – spiritually as well as financially – and the very burden suggested in the title, insofar as their illness remains associated in the minds of most with impurity and sin. Ngaïbino's camera looks at the daily struggle of his two protagonists with a kind of sacred terror, while never ignoring the moments of tenderness between them -- here actually is to be found the divine grace that they both so earnestly seek. (Liri Alienor Chapelan)