"REVEIL SUR MARS", a fascinating documentary on a medical enigma

The Geneva-based director Dea Gjinovci followed a Kosovar family seeking asylum in Sweden, whose two daughters fell into a deep coma when their application was rejected. A film to discover in streaming until Thursday.

In Horndal, a village in central Sweden, Furkan and his family are faced with a medical conundrum that turns their lives upside down. The two oldest daughters, Ibadeta and Djeneta, fell into comas one after the other when the family's request for asylum was rejected. This profound apathy has a name, the "resignation syndrome". This state is compared to the "freezing" reaction of certain animals that, when exposed to danger, play dead. The Geneva-based director Dea Gjinovci became interested in this strange case after reading a report in the New Yorker by a journalist who had met many families in Sweden who were victims of this syndrome. The photo that illustrated the article showed two young girls asleep, like Sleeping Beauties, Ibadeta and Djeneta. This report upset the director who wanted to know more and decided to go to Sweden to make a documentary, as touching as it is beautiful, "Réveil sur Mars", to be discovered in streaming until Thursday within the framework of the Solothurn Film Festival. "I met other families suffering from the same disease. I chose this one because I speak Albanian. It was important for me to be able to communicate without a translator in order to build trust and have access to their intimacy," the director explained to RTS.

A younger brother who dreams of Mars

For weeks, she filmed this family, paying particular attention to the youngest brother, Furkan, ten years old, who is passionate about astronomy and whose mission is to build a rocket to take his sisters to Mars, far from their torment. "Furkan is a child who has internalized a lot of the suffering his sisters have gone through. He could translate what they could not say," says the director who is passionate about the theme of exile, as evidenced by her first film "Without Kosovo" which told the story of a student from Pristina forced to flee his country. Beyond this particular case, "Wake up to Mars" questions our relationship to exile. "When children have been traumatized in their country of origin, the arrival in a host country is a great moment of security for them, they feel better. But when they are refused to stay there, all the original traumas come back", says Dea Gjinovci who interviewed many doctors and psychiatrists to find out why this syndrome was Swedish.

Other cases were noted, in particular in Australia or in Lesbos, but in Sweden, this syndrome was diagnosed since ten years, with a true medical follow-up". Dea Gjinovci, director of "Awakening on Mars"

An awakening after five years

The director had already edited her film when she learned that Ibadeta and Djeneta had woken up, six months apart, after five years of coma for one and three for the other, a few weeks after the family received a provisional permit. The film ends with a photo of the two girls coming back to life. "We didn't want to go back to Sweden to film them. That would have been a bit artificial, but I wanted to give hope".Dea Gjinovci nevertheless returned to the family in a personal capacity and the two young women recognized her by her voice. "During all this time, they were conscious. They told me that they felt a sense of calm when there were people around them, but that as soon as we moved away, they felt an extreme sense of loneliness, abandoned to their own world."