Kennedys Hirn (2010)

Louise Cantor, a dedicated archaeologist, travels from Kenya to her hometown of Gothenburg to give a guest lecture. When she arrives at her son Hendrik’s apartment, she finds him lying dead in his bed. The official investigations leave no doubt that the cause of death was suicide, since the autopsy reveals that he had taken an overdose of sleeping pills. It also comes to light that Hendrik had been working as a reporter in Africa and had contracted HIV there. What seems credible at first raises Louise’s doubts. So her son was supposed to be a suicide? She sets out on her own to investigate what happened before her son’s death. In the process, she discovers that Hendrik had apparently been on the trail of a scandal in South Africa. Louise contacts her husband Aron, who left the family 25 years ago. She wants to tell him about their son’s death. She learns from Aron that Hendrik had borrowed a large sum of cash from him. The suspicion arises that Hendrik wanted to use it to buy information. Louise flies to Cape Town with Aron to investigate further. The trail leads to Diana Botha, an employee at a freight forwarding company. However, she claims not to know Henrik. Later, Aron is suddenly found dead. The investigations conclude that he was the victim of a robbery-murder of the kind common in Africa, involving a European tourist. Louise then decides to return home. However, just before setting off, she decides to explore the capital, Maputo. There, she falls victim to a mugging. With all her documents gone, embassy employee Lars Hakansson proves very helpful. He gets her new identification papers, and in conversation with him, it emerges that he knew her son Hendrik well. She learns that her son had volunteered at a clinic for people with AIDS. The suspicion now naturally arises that he contracted HIV there. Louise’s further investigations prove successful. She discovers that Hendrik had a girlfriend named Lucinda and tracks her down. Lucinda worked as a nurse at the clinic in question. Hendrik wanted her to quit the job, because his investigations had revealed that the HIV tests at the clinic were not intended to test patients for HIV at all; instead, the patients were deliberately infected with HIV during the tests so that a new vaccine could later be tested on them, offering the serum’s manufacturer extremely lucrative prospects. Later in the film, when Louise gets on the trail of a mastermind behind these events, she is in for a bitter surprise.