Glass Child

Glass Child is rooted in my own childhood, growing up with a younger brother who lived with Tourette’s, ADHD, and OCD. For me, everyday family life was barely normal as anything could suddenly collapse into violent chaos. All my life I felt very guilty for also suffering from this, because I was always the healthy sibling.

What I want to capture is not only my brother’s struggle, but also the unspoken weight that siblings like me have to carry. Those who learned to stay quiet, to take up little space and to be “the easy one”. Above all, the child that the parents never had to worry about. This film is raw, intimate and real. I want to hold audiences in the same deeply psychological contradiction Anja feels: unconditional love, comfort and compassion going hand-in-hand with exhaustion, anger, melancholy and guilt. Her feelings are personified by a hurtful, sweltering fire that she encounters multiple times throughout the film in a void.

My vision was to create an honest film that does not romanticise the complexity of mental illnesses in any way. It is about acceptance, about how families must face tough times as a team and choose to simply be there for each other, despite the circumstances. What I reveal here is not only a slice of my life. Glass Child is for every sibling who has ever thought they had to put their own struggles and needs last and for every child that ever felt like it’s their task to fix their brother or sister.