Requiem

Michaela leaves her strict rural Catholic home to study at university, where new freedoms, epilepsy, and mounting psychological distress begin to overwhelm her. As seizures and terrifying states worsen, she and those around her turn from medicine toward faith, and her family and priests come to understand her condition as possession requiring religious intervention.

Drawn from a real case, the film sets a clinical account of psychosis and epilepsy against a religious one and refuses to settle which frame is true, showing how a family's beliefs shape what a young woman's suffering is allowed to mean. It gives a therapist a case study in explanatory models and the collision of psychiatry with faith. It won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival in 2006.