What should Dijana
do?
Chronic pain for 20 years.
The course in ACCEPTANCE doesn't help and the wheat pillow constantly spinning in the microwave makes no difference.
She smokes on the balcony, cooks, scrolls.
It also doesn't help that the Balkan aunties, connected in a constant video call, give beauty tips and rave about relaxing spa experiences.
Now
Dijana's daughter Andrea, who still lives at home, 33 and a performance artist, will now make an art project about her working-class mother, to "contextualize her pain".
Now that's enough!
Snežana Spasenoska
makes her acting debut in Gabriela Pichler's well-made miniseries and it's hard to imagine a better cast.
Spasenoska owns every scene – from the most tender moments when a buttery hit makes memories flood to the outbursts where the air trembles as if with the wrath of a Greek god.
"As an immigrant woman from the working class, my mother must now be freed from the curse of invisibility," writes Andrea in her scholarship application.
Instead, it will be Andrea who will receive a lesson in liberation: now it is mother who will make art of her.
And here "
Painkiller" goes from being a captivating, well-made and charming series about a mother and a daughter, to putting its finger on something that feels new.
Because what happens when the immigrant parent, so often portrayed by a generation of young cultural creators, also turns out to have fingers that can point?
Pichler exposes something slightly vampiric in the portrayal of the one who lacks his own voice.
Just this year, Pichler himself used his own mother's chronic pain as a study object in the exhibition "Mechanical movements despite pain" at Röda sten konsthall.
Maybe the series is her way of saying sorry?
Interesting!
Refreshing!