If we think of depression as a natural response to our current, common political reality, rather than a medical pathology or individual failing, what transformation of the underlying causes of this condition might become possible? Paula Ďurinová, a Slovak director based in Berlin, creates space for us to reflect on this in the hope of sparking the «click» in perception needed to acknowledge the societal basis of our mental suffering and channel it into resistance with her second Berlin-set documentary feature Action Item, an exploratory and pointedly sensory work which screened in the Proxima competition at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic.
Public space. Private unease
As the documentary begins, the navigation of public space pairs uneasily, and unstoppably, with private unease. A cyclist glides through an urban blur of streets as a woman’s voice, intimately confessional but disembodied from the image, recounts her experience of an escalating mental crisis. The woman had been surviving on autopilot and was no longer able to block out the bureaucratic holding pattern of pressure her unanswered residency application had trapped her in, during the limbo of a pause in activism she had felt forced to make in case it jeopardised her chances of gaining a more secure existence in the city. In the midst of distracting mental pain, she had ignored a physical injury, and its worsening forced her to confront all the ways she had been detached from her own body and feelings.
The film initially provides little to anchor us in Berlin. Our gaze is obstructed, and our bearings disoriented, as the environment comes to us in fragments that even veer into abstraction — a world of half-light and silhouettes, it is impossible to get into clear focus, in which solitary anguish finds no still repose. But as the film progresses, the struggle to move beyond a state of merely pretending to function in today’s world becomes a shared and intentional activity. First-person testimony of not coping loses its sense of shameful taboo, becoming instead a beacon for truthful authenticity and engagement in changemaking with other like-minded citizens.
the struggle to move beyond a state of merely pretending to function in today’s world becomes a shared and intentional activity.
Burnout
In Ďurinová’s previous Lapilli (2024), rock formations provided the landscapes for a meditation on time and grief, and its concern with relating difficult emotion to a wider ecosystem reverberates here. Action Item is another deeply personal work, which sprang from the filmmaker’s need to process her own episode of burnout. It is constituted not as passive representation but as utopian contagion, creating the world anew, even as it registers the gravity of fatigue. Its title reads as an antidote to corporate jargon; its subject is the real work deserving of the attention that is so often misdirected by the relentless grind of survival under neoliberal capitalism.
«Today’s public secret is everyone is anxious,» we hear. North American academic Ann Cvetkovich, known for her book Depression: A Public Feeling, combining memoir and critical essay, is among the thinkers quoted in a film which positions itself as one additional element plugged into a greater, constantly evolving, and inclusive consciousness-raising resource and site of solidarity building.
As our gaze becomes less impeded, moments of still, slow contemplation open up, and we’re invited close in with a group of young people who have come together in Berlin to share their struggles with depression and anxiety in these times, reading texts together and meditating. They have opted for empathy and mutual support over a prevalent concept of aggressive self-optimisation and the elusive pursuit of perfect mental health, through which privatised healthcare disguises the structural basis of discontent, as if every individual were responsible for their own cure.
These calm sequences of retreat are a precursor to the real teeth of this film, which ultimately honours a belief in the power of productive rage. The montage of images that it finally brings into our field of vision, resplendent in their symbolic force and raw, singular commitment, are ones memorable from news media footage around the globe, of protesters in full flight of defiance, from Istanbul to Cairo and beyond. In one widely disseminated sequence from recent Tbilisi protests over rigged elections and the Georgian ruling regime’s authoritarian slide, a young woman strides alone toward a wall of riot police, their shields raised, and tries to kick straight through the cordon. This display of audacious defiance of brute power does not seem to be one of premeditated strategy, but rather outrage that has spontaneously boiled over a tipping point, obliterating fear and restoring dignity, even if instant triumph beyond the gesture seems unlikely in this long, ever-repeating struggle for people’s sovereignty.
Focused anger
Focused anger over injustice may be the key to alleviating our sense of atomised discomfort, by activating self-expression in resistance, Ďurinová contends in Action Item — a means to transform the violent and oppressive conditions that keep our bodies poisoned as if they had ingested industrial toxins, rather than spending our lives trying to heal or repress the symptoms. It’s a convincing premise, and her documentary is a bracing call for similar creative acts and hopeful gestures, as it shakes us into realigning what we sense and feel with what we believe.
