Review by Beatrice On 27-Jun-2023
Life always finds ways to circumvent reality, to veil it, to replace it, always with a momentary pleasure of relief, but always at the cost of an actual loss of life or illness
A 10-year-old Roma boy dreams of building a spaceship to travel to Mars.
The sisters are the "sleeping beauties" in an unenchanted and yet surreal and cruel reality.
This is not a good beginning for a fairy tale because it is not a fairy tale but a harrowing truth.
This documentary tells the story of a persecuted Roma family in Kosovo who fled and sought asylum in Sweden. Four children, two boys and two girls suffering from a newly identified and still rather mysterious disease. Named in many ways: "sleeping beauty disease," "catatonic state," "apathy," exactly UPPGIVENHETSSYNDROM, in English Resignation Syndrome that affects only the children of migrants in Sweden.
The camera enters the life of this close-knit family struggling to have their right to asylum recognized.
The Roma scandal in Kosovo concerns some 8,000 citizens of this ethnic group whose settlement is being looted and set on fire. Many of them fled for fear of being attacked by Albanian Kosovars who accused the Roma of collaborating with the Serbs.
Some families, including the family the film deals with initially received asylum for three years, then were deported and once back in their country persecuted again.
Back in Sweden they are struggling to obtain permanent citizenship and are facing the drama of the illnesses of the two young girls: Djeneta stuck to her bed since she was 12 years old followed a year later by her sister Ibaneta. Both unable to stand up, feed themselves or respond to any stimulus, fed with a nasogastric tube.
The tragedy experienced by the children of these families is that of always being caught between renewals and bureaucracies, and from this tragic instability springs a form of cultural psychogenesis, an alteration of psychic functions with profound consequences: precariously traversing the world in the wake of parents strains the survival and psyche of children, and this precarious condition linked to the expiration of renewals creates a grueling experience of fragility.
What we call a mental disorder may be considered an "abnormal" way of reacting to a normal situation: but perhaps it is equally and more fair to consider it a normal way of reacting to a succession of abnormal situations
How much the psyche affects the soma is now well known from Freudian insight into the unconscious to studies of psychosomatics and the placebo, yet this inevitable connection exposes medical science to continual and surprising pathologies that are the result of constantly changing cultures and realities.
From Jaspers onward, psychiatry rather than a catalog of behavioral oddities and eccentricities, as it used to be, becomes a study of the ways of being expressed in the individual experiences of the person, received without interpretive-theoretical inferences, but as precisely "phenomena to be studied in their lived concreteness."
The illness recounted by the documentary would depend on the disappearance of an internal harmony or pre-existing order that is disturbed and altered and is often an unconscious attempt to give an answer or solve a problem on an emotional and mental level.
The Swedish government report suggests the fact that apathetic children come from "holistic cultures," where it is "difficult to draw the boundaries between the private sphere of the individual and the collective sphere." They have sacrificed for their families by losing consciousness. "Even if they were not directly encouraged and given any directives," the report states, "many children raised with holistic thinking may still act according to the 'implicit' rules of the group."
The guidelines make use of the notion of a "sense of coherence" introduced by Israeli sociologist Aaron Antonovsky. Mental well-being, Antonovsky theorizes, depends on our belief that life is orderly, understandable, structured and predictable. Antonovsky suggests, as Freud had done, that psychological illness arises from incoherence of narrative, from a life story that veers off course.
An exhausting and harrowing everyday life as experienced by this family that along with others must relate to an ontologically contemporary pathological experience; the identification of disorders that are the result of morbi cum e sine materia that only phenomenological psychiatry had long sensed, subtracting the search for a cure from the positivistic myth of an exhaustive resolution in the field of brain pathology and its total subservience to the neuro-pathological sciences, thus paving the way for a more properly anthropological approach in the study of mental illness.
The need to know what human beings feel in their experiences and how they live them: approaching the experiences of the other with a constant and conscious effort of identification through the value of the "empathic" tool in order to be able to relive the experiencing of others.
GIinovci, makes us reflect at length on these issues, chasing, for years, with her camera a family experience that reflects a now global social-political-economic reality: what and how many will be all those psychopathologies that this world will produce in the years to come and that will arouse the amazement of psychiatry, such as the identification of the resignation syndrome?
What and how many will be all those psychopathologies that this world will produce in the years to come that will still arouse perplexity, doubts, interpretations, diagnoses, and basic questions if the driving forces of history continue to be capitalistic in nature and if such socio-economic pathology is closely related to the pathologies to which we are exposed?
Very often, mental disorder is the only freedom left to those who have no freedom: the way of understanding of those who have not been enabled to understand otherwise: the only power of those who have no power
27-Jun-2023 by Beatrice