Who's afraid of Alice Miller?

CH 2020, 101 min, Daniel Howald

Martin is rejected by his cold, uncaring mother and beaten by his father: a childhood without love. It sounds like a case right out of the book “The Drama of the Gifted Child” by world-renowned Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller. Except Martin is the son of the children’s rights advocate.

After Alice Miller’s death, Martin embarks on a journey to finally understand the contradiction between the famous childhood trauma researcher and the destructive mother. He finally discovers what stood between him and his mother: the greatest drama of the 20th century, the Shoah, the annihilation of the Jewish people. As a young Jew, Alice Miller assumed a false identity to survive amidst the Nazis in Warsaw – and was forced to witness all the atrocities. But Alice repressed these traumatic experiences, disassociating herself from them for the rest of her life. The deeper Martin digs into his mother’s biography, the clearer it becomes: his own emotional pain is the legacy of something that he himself never experienced.