Nika Mhlanga

Physical Destiny

Physical Destiny is a documentary exploring the day to day experiences of living with chronic pain in politicized body.

“Physical Destiny is a 10 minute short about the experience of living with and through chronic pain. It consists of two primary components: audio recording discussions with various people I know about their experiences with pain, and video documentation of my personal pain management throughout the month of February, 2023. The documentary follows my personal journey through pain, specifically the way it affects my day to day lifestyle within my home, and is supported by discussions not just about the feeling of pain, but also the social context of being socialized as a woman and existing with ongoing pain related issues. I spent a lot of the preproduction time for this project writing a media research analysis essay based on the same excerpt that I used in the beginning of the film from Fleabag. I did extensive research on the different articulations of pain across the gender binary. There were two fundamental texts that helped to shape my understanding of femme-based pain by Rebecca J Lester and Lisa Appignanesi. First was Mad, Bad And Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present by Appignanesi and this led me to Lester’s Lessons from the borderline: Anthropology, psychiatry and the risks of being human. Appignanesi provided significant context into the running themes throughout medicine for women, and helped me structure my questions for the interviews. Lester’s work about borderline personality disorder and how it is used by medical professionals as a modern day alternative to female hysteria. This significantly impacted my state of mind at the time of working on the project and I shifted the format to be more confrontational in certain areas, channeling my frustration into the film.Overall the creation of Physical Destiny was an exploration process both technically and theoretically. The work is both a raw documentation of my relationship with pain and an opportunity for discourse about the way we understand pain in general. The conversations are an insight into how my closest community members feel about these issues, and I hope to keep the discussion going long after the completion of the work. ”