Jennifer Brea documented her chronic fatigue syndrome on an iPhone so doctors would believe other women
“From as early as I can remember, I wanted to swallow the world whole,” first-time filmmaker Jennifer Brea declares at the start of her documentary Unrest.
As a young woman, she attended Harvard and then Princeton to study political science. She traveled widely and fell in love. And then she became incredibly, inexplicably tired, often unable to get out of bed and unable to get herself up off the floor if she fell. She was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome (also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis, or ME), a little-understood but not at all rare disease that affects an estimated 836,000 to 2.5 million people in the United States. It has no cure.
As a bed-ridden Brea explains in the film, “It was like I had died but was forced to...