High Spirits is a documentary project aiming to raise awareness of what we believe to be one of the most important, yet widely ignored problems fueling the Sub-Saharan HIV/AIDS epidemic: alcohol abuse.

The resilience of the human spirit is a remarkable thing. Anyone who has travelled in the third world will have been struck by people’s capacity for joy and laughter in the face of all too often tragic circumstances. Poverty, illness, the lack of gainful employment, are often accepted as a part of daily life, and the people make the best of what little joy is to be found, in the friendly conversation, or the excitement of a football game.

In spite of the many difficulties that trouble their daily lives, the people of Botswana remain open, friendly, and upbeat. Visiting Botswana in the summer of 2007 to research this documentary, we were all struck by this.

We set out to explore a country with the second highest rate of HIV infection in the world, where only a few years before, the average life expectancy was below 40 years of age, and according to some estimates as low as 35; a country where in spite of a thriving national economy, and considerable wealth from the diamond and tourism industries, unofficial unemployment rates climb to 40%.

We were not sure of what we would find, but what none of us expected was the people’s apparent capacity to carry on living normal lives, working, playing cards with friends, laughing together over a few beers in the evening…

But then as we strayed further from the urban centres, into the countryside and beyond, to the wilderness at the edge of the Kalahari Desert, a darker current emerged: the same resilience and friendliness prevailed, and spirits were still high on company, conversation and beer, but the proportions were no longer the same. For more and more people, feeling good meant beer, a lot of it, and almost all of the time. And for some it meant being “over-drunk”, to borrow the local expression.

In the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Botswana, the steady supply of free time and cheap beer makes for a deadly mix. When we asked locals about this, it seemed everyone was aware of the danger, but at the same time, they were all too willing to laugh it off with a chilling fatalism.

With the exception of brewery officials, for whom there is absolutely no connection between alcohol and HIV/AIDS, the public figures we spoke to all acknowledged that alcohol abuse is a major problem, yet no solutions were forthcoming.

For a long time, even the government seemed all too willing to sweep the issue under the carpet. But since our visit, the new president, Ian Khama, has been making a stand against the dangers of alcohol. As he put it at World Aids Day: “The continued abuse of alcohol is one of the greatest obstacles to Botswana’s Vision 2016 ideal of an HIV free nation by 2016”.