Diagnonsense

The odyssey of Norwegian Ane-Martha Tamnes Hansgård who, at the age of 15, started getting diagnosed with one mental disorder after the other, as she herself has recorded it in a desperate attempt to embark on a self-discovery journey, despite being bombarded with all sorts of psychotropic drugs on a permanent basis. But what the emerging filmmaker recomposes in Diagnonsense transcends the boundaries of a fragmented self-portrait, shattered by labels and the stigma of a mental disease diagnosis; it’s a reflective gaze, overflowing with courage and ingeniousness into the fragility and the challenges experienced by each person who ends up imprisoned in the vicious circle of psychiatry’s medical model of care. At the same time, it serves as a reassurance that, even if we accept cinema will not save the world, at least it has the rare and invaluable power to (self)heal.