A MILLION GRAINS OF SAND

by Andrea Deaglio

On the table in her office, psychotherapist Eva Pattis Zoja keeps a container with sand. The sand records the images her fingers trace on its surface, but not the words: psychic trauma is a fracture that prevents feelings from emerging and narrative from flowing. The traumas of patients affected by wars and natural disasters but also, perhaps, the trauma of Eve herself. Images of the sands thus mingle with those of History and those of her own life. An inner investigation, delving into the personal and the collective nightmare of the victims of genocide. For a trauma is never just an individual matter: it is transmitted between generations, reflected in History.

Director’s statement
During a war or natural disaster, counts are made of the dead, injured, and hospitalized. The “wounded inside,” the traumatized, are often overlooked. Yet the disorders can be extremely severe: inability to eat, sleep, or feel emotions.

When I came across the story of the Yazidi population, brutally massacred by ISIS militants in 2014, leaving only women and children alive after unspeakable torture and atrocities, a pressing question arose: how can they return to life? How can one overcome a trauma so immense that it seems unimaginable?

It was at this point that I met Dr. Eva Pattis Zoja, a psychotherapist who, with the Yazidis, was implementing an innovative therapeutic approach based on sand, silence, and play. And above all, on images, because sandwork therapy is a kind of miniature cinema. The sand acts as a very sensitive receiving device, recording the slightest movement with precision, as if millions of grains were ready to “eavesdrop.” Through hands and miniature objects, our wounded unconscious is given the opportunity to create an image. And it is precisely that image that provides access to that place within us where our cursed trauma resides.

I was able to accompany Eva on an extraordinary journey into the understanding of trauma and its overcoming. We visited communities where surviving Yazidis of the genocide are hosted, then in Ukraine among the displaced from the Donbass war. And finally in Bolzano, her hometown, where Eva’s trauma is hidden among old letters and photographs. From her past emerges a love story starring the young Thérèse and her lover, Hermann, who was enlisted in 1942 by the Wehrmacht and sent to fight on the Russian front, where he never gave news again. It is a transgenerational suffering that has shaped Eva’s professional life.

The film thus becomes a testament to a lifetime dedicated to healing. This film is a journey (for me it began in 2007 with a short documentary titled “Nera,” which told the story of a Nigerian girl forced to sell herself on the street to repay a debt) to discover the origin and nature of trauma and the possibilities of recognizing and overcoming it.