QUEEN tells the story of the friendship between two very different women: Kenyan Queen (35), a single mother of two who lives in one of Nairobi's largest slums, and Anna (37), a Irish/Italian journalist who is sent to Kenya in 1999. As a white expat, Anna lives a naturally comfortable life in Nairobi. After her first professional successes, her new assignment is her acid test for a permanent position. Anna is driven by ambition and tries not to let the hardships of her job or deeper feelings get to her. Queen has been through and overcome a lot but has never let it get her down. She is bursting with vitality, humour and ingenuity. In financial straits, she convinces Anna that every white person needs a housekeeper and starts working for her. It is not long before she makes herself indispensable in Anna's professional and private life and a relationship develops between the two women, which repeatedly reaches its limits due to their different lives. Queen succeeds in cracking Anna's hard shell and she confronts Anna with her Western self-image and makes her take a closer look. When Queen falls ill with Aids, the circle that connects the two women comes full circle and Queen initiates a fight for affordable medication and ultimately democracy. Empowerment and emancipation from the global North are the common thread along which the story unfolds and leads Anna and Queen on a journey together that is in truth a declaration of war. Against disease, poverty, the pharmaceutical industry and a corrupt government. The historical framework is the HIV pandemic and the question of whether skin colour should determine access to life-saving medicines