A Million Grains of Sand

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.