Jennifer Brea’s award-winning directorial debut has found a home. PBS has bought the U.S. broadcast rights to “Unrest,” Indiewire reports. The documentary centers on a medical mystery: Brea’s own.
“When I was 28, I was a PhD student at Harvard and engaged to the love of my life. Then I came down with a terrible fever,” Brea recounted to Women and Hollywood. “Although doctors told me my symptoms were ‘all in my head,’ I grew progressively more ill, and within months I was unable even to sit in a wheelchair.”
Eventually Brea found answers online — “a hidden world of millions of people confined to their homes and bedrooms by ME, an illness commonly called chronic fatigue syndrome,” she explained. “‘Unrest’ follows my personal story as my husband Omar and I, newlyweds, grapple with how to live in the face of a life-long illness.”
“Ultimately, the film goes beyond this specific disease to become a portrait of the human capacity for resilience and love despite life-altering loss,” Brea told us.
The film premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it took home the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Editing.
Indiewire writes that “Unrest” will premiere on PBS’ “Independent Lens” “during the first quarter of 2018, following a national theatrical distribution.” If you’re attending SXSW 2017, you’ll have a chance to see the doc before it hits PBS and theaters.
“Since I first picked up my camera and began documenting the unseen world of homebound patients, it’s been my dream to share the story of my community with a public audience,” Brea said in a statement. “I am so thrilled and humbled to bring ‘Unrest’ to ‘Independent Lens’ and have it reach the widest audience possible.”
SVOD rights for “Unrest” are still being negotiated.
