Schnupfen im Kopf/Head Cold
Gamma Bak
Germany/Hungary
2010, 93 min
World Premiere
21 February 2010
Delphi Filmpalast, Berlin
A plain-spoken and honest answer to the question, What is it like to be psychotic?
To start, there is the great loneliness of serious illness. The title refers to a comment by Gamma Bak’s partner at the time, during her first crisis: “This is all like a head cold, it will pass.”
Gamma Bak had her first psychosis in 1995, when she was thirty years old, working as a film director and producer in Berlin. Bak was supposed to be part of the free generation – a Jew from Hungary, who never knew totalitarianism, living a free and easy life in an open society. What she got instead was an adult life punctuated by seven episodes of schizoid-affective psychosis, in and out of psychiatric institutions, treated by a total of fourteen doctors and six psychologists, and prescribed twenty-four different antipsychotic drugs over fourteen years.
Bak tells her story through a series of interviews – with friends, ex-partners, colleagues, relatives, a fellow patient, and with herself – and clips from previous films, including East… West… Home’s Best (1992) and Eine Frau und ihr Kontrabass (A Woman and Her Contrabass, 1994).
“Who am I, if I can’t write my name any more?”
“Schnupfen im Kopf is a biographical tale. My story offers ingress to the complex topic by being occasion and example in one. People with my illness are marked and battered. They usually live in exclusion on early retirement, welfare, or unemployment. They very rarely hold a regular job. Life is torn between hospital stays and long phases of convalescence. Crises are often followed by depressions that last longer than the crises and are almost equally bad. One’s self-confidence is shaken, and the eternal struggle with the necessary medications and their side effects, which impair the quality of life, is grueling.”
There’s no trace of exhibitionism in Bak’s relentless gaze, and no voyeurism in this documentary. Instead, the film grapples openly with questions of responsibility for one’s own life, and the necessity of walking through what cannot be overcome.
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