EINE KRANKHEIT WIE EIN GEDICHT // Kinotour in Hamburg & Filmgespräch

Theater Tour in Hamburg—followed by a post-screening discussion with director and protagonist Jelena Ilić

Audience Award Winner at the Max Ophüls Prize & the International Women’s Film Festival Dortmund|Cologne

“Drug-induced, chronic schizoaffective psychosis of the manic type, polytox type, not morphine type”—that is my father’s diagnosis.
In plain language, this means: He goes through the same cycle over and over again. Psychoses tear him away from reality; hospital stays bring him back, followed by depressive shame. During these psychoses, he is unpredictable and openly acts out his violence, even against the people around him. To me, however, he is not just a perpetrator whose actions I deeply condemn, but also a person I love and an artist I admire.
He has captured the world of his psychoses in photographs, paintings, and sculptures. Our relationship, too, finds expression in art: in a collaborative comic book whose pages we take turns filling with drawings. He is fighting against himself, against his illness, and against the system. And I am by his side.
The multiple Audience Choice Award winner, *A Disease Like a Poem*, tells with warmth, humor, and great visual power the story of reversed parent-child roles, the poetry in chaos, and the pervasive nature of an illness.