A smiling, naked toddler is encouraged to show off how strong she is. The same child plays in a basin in the shower and later dances naked around the room to music. These are innocent, cheerful images of a playful child being filmed by family members, but the captions give them sinister connotations. Filmmaker Anna Hanslik was the child in question.
In this autobiographical essay she looks back with the knowledge that she was sexually abused at that age by a family member who also appears in these images. As an adult, she wonders how the child in this footage must have felt.
She reconstructs the past and understands now where her nightmares came from, what trauma she was dealing with and how distanced she became from her own body. In this intimate and personal film, Hanslik recalls painful memories and attempts finally to embrace and defend her sexuality, her body and her boundaries.
