In Ji.hlava Documentary Film Festival winner “Gray Zone,” Slovak director Daniela Meressa Rusnoková proves that the personal can be universal, reliving her son’s premature birth. “I’d had two children before, so I knew how it ‘should’ go.
Suddenly, he was fighting for his life, in agony. I was in absolute shock. I realized how many people experience that.
It’s such a massive topic, so how come we don’t know about it? How come I didn’t know?!” At 24 weeks, the fetus is not yet legally recognized as a human being. It’s called the “gray zone.” As she points out, it doesn’t mean that people working in such units don’t see their patients as children.
“They even have eyelashes. But when a child like that dies, families don’t know they can have a quiet moment with the baby or that they can perform their own rituals. It’s so sudden.
You expected life and got nothing. But unless there’s a proper goodbye, we can’t heal.” At the Czech festival, “Gray Zone” was named the winner of the First Lights section, it also won for best sound design and a Visegrad Award.
“I’m shocked by all this fame. I live in a flat with linoleum floors,” smiles Rusnoková. In the film, she shows the struggles of caring for a premature newborn and later for a boy with disabilities.
Referencing her own experiences, but also those of so many others. “You never hear about what mothers go through or what such separation could mean for a child. I had terrible.
