One of this year's Best Documentary (Short Subject) Oscar nominees is the 40-minute Netflix release Life Overtakes Me, which I watched this morning. It focuses on three families coping with resignation syndrome, a paralytic condition afflicting child refugees who struggle to adapt to their new lives in foreign countries. Its severity can range from children and teenagers becoming socially withdrawn and losing motion and/or speech to express a feeling of stress or hopelessness, to even having to be fed via a tube.
I had never even heard of this horrifying ailment before until Life Overtakes Me, but the documentary moved and enraged me so profoundly that I was shaking by the end of it. With a wholly admirable impartiality it reveals why and when these families emigrated Sweden, where it was made, to give a glimpse of some of the injustices that necessitate immigration to begin with (one of the children's fathers was an online political dissident in his family's home country), alongside actually showing RS at its worst.
Obviously I am no expert on RS; again I didn't even know of its existence until today. But what I have seen and learned about it now has already impacted me viscerally, and it sure as hell needs more awareness. Life Overtakes Me can obviously do that, and hopefully will continue to especially if it wins the Oscar, but it needs my help. Everybody's, in fact, and that also goes for the unpleasant side of, and reasons for, immigration.
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