"Do not forget those who died for nothing but the sin of being a woman."

The story of witches intertwines with less reassuring female figures from the cinematic encyclopedia to recount the time Sankey herself spent in a psychiatric ward after the birth of her son.

Interviews with medical professionals, patients, experts, and historians offer a multifaceted view of women who encounter postpartum mental health problems. The discussion centers around perinatal psychosis, a phenomenon almost unknown due to the stigma surrounding the idea of a happy motherhood.

Sankey, like other women who have faced this disorder, describes how everything seemed fine until after childbirth, when suddenly, life turns into a horror movie and even one's home becomes the most frightening place in the world. The dark side of motherhood reveals itself—a topic rarely discussed because society is afraid, seeing the mother as a source of safety.

Anxiety, depression, chronic insomnia take hold, and psychosis, a separation from reality, becomes a sudden event that often leads to seeing devils and demons in the eyes of one’s own children. Being told you’re a bad mother, and feeling like one, is among the most devastating aspects that can trigger these psychoses.

Once in a psychiatric institution, the recovery process begins, driven by the negative feelings towards the children that make mothers fear being alone with them the most.

These stories highlight that, from the moment pregnancy begins, guilt sets in—pressures, expectations, and fears of not being good enough follow. Even witches condemned in the 15th and 16th centuries reported similar symptoms, with fevers due to sepsis: manic episodes were linked to madness, that is, puerperal psychosis. Witches were seen as the opposite of the good mother and the good wife; many of them confessed willingly to meet their deaths.

Today, suicides are on the rise because awareness of “maternalité,” a term coined by Racamier to emphasize the importance of the psychological and emotional processes that develop alongside biological motherhood, remains low. This crucial phase in a woman's life involves an identity crisis—postpartum mood fluctuations that, while often rapid and severe, can also quickly recede.

Even after 100 years, the stigma persists: identifying mothers and children at risk is essential. Women's illnesses are often underestimated, disregarded, not taken seriously. Postpartum depression and anxiety are frequently minimized, and perinatal psychosis remains unknown.

Sankey, recounting her still-unresolved experience two and a half years later, underscores how women feel powerless, unheard, like enemies of a society that wants them to fit a specific mold. Culturally, we need to learn to embrace the witch: healing can be gradual, but it must be accompanied by experts.

Often, good witches are young and beautiful prisoners, but their magic is just an empty trick. If you are not a happy mother, with a happy motherhood, then you are wrong, a bad mother—that is the trick that condemns you.

“Every woman is a witch, and every woman needs a coven.”

How have witches been portrayed in the past?

How have unsettling women been represented in cinema?

How are women portrayed on television and in the media?

What continues to stigmatize the representation of the good mother and the bad mother?

Has this portrayal changed, or is the lack of awareness about perinatal psychosis still indicative of how deeply hidden, beneath the stereotype of motherhood/happiness, lies a profoundly dramatic reality and a hypocritical charade of role-playing?

After Romantic Comedy in 2019, Sankey explores her traumatic experience through an intricate puzzle of film clips ranging from Rosemary's Baby to Possession, touching on all those cinematic works attentive to female pathologies linked to evil and the popular mythology of witches. This is a biographical, artistic, social, political, and critical testimony: a masterful lesson in cinema, a notable assertion of women's rights in all the pathological, peculiar, heterogeneous, specific, and alternative ways of being that make a woman a plastic creation of others' desires, condemned to represent the role "normally" enforced by cultural restraints that make the reason for illness the dis-reason of the "Great Other" of reason.

Sankey emphasizes the need for a change in the epistemological paradigm, countering madness as both cause and effect of moral condemnation and social exclusion—a target of criminalization. Her film calls for madness to be restored to itself, to the normality of being madness, not something apart from reason. Because everything real has its own rationality, and the way we perceive things is historically determined—it is not valid in itself.

Let’s come to terms with this!

The way we look at things needs to be questioned, and that is a sign of health!

(On Mubi from November 22)

18-Nov-2024 by Beatrice