Ann

One day Kristien Hemmerechts receives an email from a woman she doesn't know at all, Ann. Ann asks Kristien the question she has often been asked: would you write down my story? For once, the writer accepts the request. Ann has been suffering from anorexia for years, which seems incurable, and wants to end her life. She is carrying an incestuous past: a wound that her family is willing to believe if necessary, but which she doesn't seem to act on. And so Ann keeps calling out with her emaciated body: believe me. Kristien Hemmerechts speaks with Ann, her brothers and her mother, and later also with (sometimes unwilling) therapists. She reports in diary form on the confrontation with an insoluble family history and a stubborn pattern of illness. She notes the continuous failure of the medical and psychological support that Ann received. She admires Ann's courage to keep fighting despite everything. Kristien Hemmerechts has recorded Ann's story with all the empathy and absolute honesty that are required for this. She searches for the social causes of anorexia, relates Ann's story to herself and wrestles with the eternal question: to what extent is it possible to really know another person?