Life Overtakes Me

This documentary was approached in much different way to which I would've thought they would approach it. There is a lot of visual metaphor in the particular shots they choose, not really giving much context to the backstory of each child. It jumped several places throughout, however I thought that the transitioning between stories and finding connections to move from one child to the next was a nice touch. In a way, it pulls the audience in and at times pushes them out. I'd honestly have to say that I learned more in the white text before and after the actual footage than the footage itself.

It was not the most informative film although it seemed to be more focused on the pandemic of this syndrome from an emotional perspective, I personally think that a documentaries job is among other things supposed to be informative, the emotional aspect of it should come from the facts mixed with the story which this film didn't really do. I loved the film, however there are some blank spaces where pieces of vital information and medical reliability through interviews with specialists are missing.

Very important documentary. Would have been great with added interviews with the Swedish migration center and politicians. It felt so hopeless seeing those children and feeling like yes this documentary informed us about this but what if it could have actually made a difference politically?

An absolute riveting watch. My heart broke for those families.

I found it interesting but something seemed . . . off about it. It definitely seemed one-sided. I did a bit of sleuthing and according to one source, one of the children was trained to act like they had RS. One of the doctors also reportedly had his words taken out of context in a way that seems really suspicious to me.

I don't doubt the stories behind why these refugees were in Sweden. But keeping that in mind, you have to consider that people will do anything to keep themselves and their families safe--including lying. (I don't think that makes someone a bad person, but gaining publicity from lies certainly does.) You can see how a refugee child coming down with RS can help the family secure asylum, and so I've taken the documentary with a grain of salt.

I'm not saying all of these families are liars and this isn't a real thing, but looking back after I've watched it, it seems more like one-sided propaganda than a well-balanced, multi-faceted documentary that goes into depth on the topic.

This is a very interesting subject, and some of the photography is gorgeous (namely, the overhead shots of the snowcapped forests), but the documentarians largely squander their 39 minutes of running time, leaving too many unresolved questions for the film to feel satisfying.

Resignation Syndrome is apparently a disorder in which children who have undergone traumatic experiences retreat into a catatonic state that could last months or even years. The children awaken once stability has been achieved within the family. This disorder was not recorded until the 1990s, and it has only happened in Sweden and in Nauru (an island territory off the coast of Australia; it has not happened in mainland Australia, as the film suggests at the end). For the most part, it seems only to affect the children of refugees from the Balkans or former Soviet states. I'm not denying that the symptoms of this disorder are very real and that the effect on the families is quite painful and costly, but it seems rather obvious that this is a culture-specific illness, somehow related to ideological influence. The documentary hints at this very briefly in an ambiguous voiceover, but such details could be easily missed.

I would've preferred a documentary that more rigorously explored the medical science behind this condition, the roots and history of its existence, and its relation to other disorders of questionable biological epidemiology (like "koro" in China or the South Korean belief in "fan death"). I would've also preferred a film that more thoroughly detailed the lives and struggles of the refugees featured; we get some elusive details about death threats, but we're not even told what countries the interview subjects come from or what was going on in those countries.

Instead of either of those things, however, we get long, tedious footage of catatonic children. Girls lying in bed while a doctor uses a blood pressure cuff. A boy being bathed. Children being fed through tubes. None of that is especially resonant, at least not as the film depicts it. I empathize with the children and the families taking care of them, but this movie never quite succeeds at saying anything meaningful about their struggle.