Ji.hlava Doc Festival Winner ‘Gray Zone’ Director Relives Trauma of Premature Birth to Call for Systemic Change: ‘I Played a Dangerous Game With Myself’
variety.comMarta Balaga In Ji.hlava Documentary Film Festival winner “Gray Zone,” Slovak director Daniela Meressa Rusnoková proves that the personal can be universal, reliving her son’s premature birth. “I’d had two children before, so I knew how it ‘should’ go.
Suddenly, he was fighting for his life, in agony. I was in absolute shock. I realized how many people experience that. It’s such a massive topic, so how come we don’t know about it?
How come I didn’t know?!” At 24 weeks, the fetus is not yet legally recognized as a human being. It’s called the “gray zone.” As she points out, it doesn’t mean that people working in such units don’t see their patients as children. “They even have eyelashes.
But when a child like that dies, families don’t know they can have a quiet moment with the baby or that they can perform their own rituals.
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