Croatia

Ana is sick, it's been years and she's only a little over 20. The passing of the seasons is a torment: so is the rain, the sound of the wind, the snow, but she doesn't like summer either.

She would not like to be looked at as crazy.

She takes pills, loves Martina.

Ana lives in the past, she feels suffocated she can't breathe.

She has a girlfriend but is afraid she will screw her over like her family did.

First she was happy then hell.

In love with Natja at 16, she received only contempt from her mother and shame from her father.

Parents to cover up the "scandal" of a lesbian daughter had her locked up in a hospital for mental disorders, citing drug addiction as the reason, although Ana had not used any drugs.

Here she would live in solitary confinement, with a straitjacket and psychotropic drugs.

The "cure" was supposed to be to bring her back to heterosexuality, she considered mentally ill....

And until she admitted to Dr. Vulin, her doctor-agent that she liked boys and was on drugs, they would not leave her alone.

The other patients were aggressive and schizophrenic; Ana often slept in that nightmarish atmosphere of Lopaca Psychiatric Hospital.

Her mother visited her after four months, and the girl wept; she could not understand what she actually felt about this woman who showed only contempt.

The astrologer had told him that she would marry and have many children.

Foggy and rainy autumn with repetitive noises.

They wanted to make her confess but Ana was not on drugs.

They would not confirm any improvement unless the girl admitted to Dr. Vulin what she wanted to hear.

After a year and a half Ana understood what she needed to say and they declared her cured.

Once home she reported to her parents that they had to accept her as she was, and by deception they took her back to the hell of Lopaca where she remained for a long five terrible and interminable years.

The account is given directly by the real Ana Dragicevic

It took Health Minister Darko Milinović to get her out of the hospital following a ruling by the Rijeka District Court that deemed the girl's ignoble "imprisonment" illegal, and also indicted the head of the psychiatric hospital. But Ana's adolescence has now been ruined. She could not finish school, and today she is living the physical and psychological consequences of what she went through; reduced to 47 kilos, she has nightmares every night, is without money, and has been abandoned by her family. She tried to find a job but, because of her health problems, she was fired. She lives alone and without a social life. Someone paid for her to enroll in school so that she could complete her studies, but she lacks the money to live.

Despite everything Ana is recovering to life after years of psychotherapy, after years of arbitrary treatments of duress and conspiracy.

After very long periods of nightmares, phobias, panic attacks, self-inflicted cigarette burns, after suicide attempts.

She is freeing herself from the obsessive desire for revenge and only managed to do so after learning of her mother's illness and writing a letter to her father.

The passing of the seasons that accompanies Ana's emotions seems a representation of the metaphor of that nature that has not been recognized to her, that nature deemed "unnatural" in the name of which she has been deprived of the spontaneous growth and development of her qualities, characteristics, specificities that belong to each of us.

A mortification of the soma and psyche that has left indelible traces in the name of that predetermined order that an uncultured and backward society seeks to perpetrate.

A film/documentary that punctuates the present from the past that goes beyond the present itself; an indelible testimony of pain, darkness and emptiness of love in the name of unnecessary and harmful cruelty.

A film/documentary that cannot leave one indifferent to a life cut short, to an unbridgeable trauma and its attempt at redemption and justice.

The true story of ANA DRAGICEVIC had to be told.

27-Jun-2023 by Beatrice