First scene.

Father, mother, two little girls, a beautiful house.

Inspectors on a visit: they check the family conditions, cleanliness, food in the fridge, food on the stove.

Sergei and Natalia are in Sweden seeking political asylum with their two daughters, Katja and Alina, hoping for a new life. Those hopes are shattered when their asylum application is denied. Katja, who should testify about the violent incident her father and family suffered in their home country, Russia, collapses and suddenly falls into a sort of "coma," a condition known as Resignation Syndrome or Apathy, described as a form of self-protection against fear.

Resignation Syndrome (also called Traumatic Withdrawal Syndrome, Traumatic Rejection Syndrome, Deep Sleep Syndrome, or even Sleeping Beauty Syndrome), is a psychological condition that leads to a state of reduced consciousness.

This syndrome was first identified in Sweden in the 1990s in the children of asylum seekers from the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and more recently Syria.

Resignation Syndrome, in fact, predominantly affects children and adolescents between the ages of 8 and 15 (average onset age 11.5 years) following the trauma of violence experienced in their home country, migration, and the insecurity it generates.

Although it was first described in 1958 by Dr. Anna-Lisa Annell, a Swedish child psychiatrist, as a very rare disease that manifested mainly after severe psychological trauma, this condition was not recognized by pediatricians and child psychiatrists for many years.

It was only from January 1, 2014, that the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare identified this syndrome as an official diagnosis.

The peculiarity of Resignation Syndrome is that all cases recorded so far have occurred only in Sweden. Very few children and adolescents with similar or identical symptoms have been reported by other European countries.

Recently, however, a number of refugee and asylum-seeking children in Australia have been reported to have a syndrome very similar to Resignation Syndrome: they were on Nauru Island for several years where refugee detention centers had been set up.

Looking back in time, it is possible to find cases of similar manifestations to Resignation Syndrome in children and young adults deported to Nazi concentration camps.

The therapy prescribed for Katja is grotesque: the parents must reeducate themselves to smile, to assume a facial expression of apparent serenity... the trainer is cloying, unbearable, embarrassing, robotic.

The acronym P.A.P.A. represents what they must never do:

P for Past, never speak of the past;

A for Asylum, do not mention it;

P for Problems, exclude them;

A for Anxiety, get rid of it, it poisons the children's lives.

In the hospital, where children affected by the syndrome lie in a large room, parents can observe through a glass window, and visits can be revoked if they do not cooperate, including through simulations on mannequins on how to proceed and act with the therapy on their children's bodies.

However, it becomes known that the longer the children remain in this condition, the more they lose the use of their psychophysical functions.

After the failure of the fabricated confession about their daughter Alina, which was judged and fiercely identified as a false confession during a severe interrogation, she too falls victim to the syndrome.

The parents can appeal, and considering the condition of their daughters, they can stay in Sweden, but they refuse to hospitalize both and decide to take them home, to the refugee house they are now benefiting from out of solidarity.

Sergei and Natalia will do everything to create an atmosphere of security, stability, and hope that their daughters need to awaken.

Car rides, singing to the sound of the radio, swimming in the pool, ice cream on their lips while the daughters continue in that catatonic state.

The chilling atmosphere created by Avranas, the ice penetrating sharply through the atrocious absurdity of this family's experience.

Only the sound of "a furtive tear," the love elixir by Gaetano Donizetti, is heard; everything else is silent.

Escaping from a country where democracy is to be conquered, only to land in a much-vaunted Western pseudodemocracy on paper, to find oneself in a hypocritical, classist, and morally superior context where the most important value seems to be primarily the preservation of one's privileges.

Responsibility is placed on the parents and their behavior: "when the wise man points to the moon, the fool looks at the finger," where the fool is often a cunning one with an interest in denying the objective existence of the moon and diverting attention elsewhere.

Avranas constructs this interpretative thread of the problem already addressed by the beautiful 2020 docufilm Wake up on Mars by Dea Gjinovci.

The social functions of our democratic systems are social fictions: a system/world that creates the problem without acting on prevention, but only hypocritically on the cure to ease its conscience.

The headless foolishness of technology that has ingested capitalism and replaces democracy with rhetoric and with the indifference of something that is nothing more than self-empowerment regardless of any purpose, ethics, or human value.

After Angeliki's suicide in Miss Violence, Katia and Alina's "social suicide" is not completed by throwing themselves off a balcony but happens at the hands of the unconscious produced by the hypocritical, ferocious, and politically correct system. Here, the monster is not the father/grandfather; here, the monstrosity is embodied by that Nobody who is the rationality of the system, behind which there is always Someone.

Avranas goes beyond the true story of a family to tell about a socio-economic-health phenomenon that must be confronted.

The morbus sine materia of these children, named resignation, is nothing but a suicidal syndrome: a standby from something unbearable that can also become irreversible.

Here too, Avranas' spectral girls bear all the horror of the adult world on their shoulders.

An inhumane social horror, told in a surgical, detailed, and circumstantial way.

We inhabit technology irrevocably and without choice. This is our fate as advanced Westerners, and those who, while inhabiting it, still think they can trace an essence of man beyond technical conditioning, as is sometimes heard, are unaware.

(U. Galimberti)

29-Aug-2024 by Beatrice