Unrest: Gender, Chronic Illness, and the Limits of Documentary Visibility

Unrest is the story of diagnosis and partial recovery: part detective story, part autobiography, and part documentation of an illness-based social movement. While conducting research on her own worsening symptoms, filmmaker Jennifer Brea learns that she is not as unusual as she has been led to believe. Unrest calls upon its audience to respond to Brea's ordeal and, in the spirit of all political film, to do something about the social injustice and human suffering it presents. Through her careful attention to the historical context of her own illness, Brea admirably makes visible the deep misogyny of the medical establishment.