The Pain Fugue is a documentary-portraits series about longing for a normal, carefree life. It follows Augustine, a woman in her twenties living with ravaging endometriosis, a chronic illness that affects one in ten women and is yet still invisible, overlooked, dismissed and misdiagnosed.

This is not just a story of illness, but of a life paused — of a body that cannot escape itself. Augustine’s days are now mostly spent lying down, her world confined to her bed, her bath, or her sofa. In these small spaces, her pain loops endlessly, and so does her longing: to get a respite from suffering, to move her body smoothly, to go out, to see friends outside of home for once, to stop being ruled by her pain.

The title, The Pain Fugue, is how Augustine describes her flare-ups — dissociative episodes of such pain that time blurs and the self vanishes beneath layers of agony.

Through intimate portraits of her confined home by pain, wishing she could be out, and images of her body, scarred in red by years of pressing boiling water bottles to numb the torture, or an image of her reaching to her jar of painkillers, the work creates space for concrete but poetic representations of this existence, the ache to get better, the urgency to be believed.

By seeing Augustine’s pain and her longing to get better, we can maybe start to see the countless others rendered invisible by a world that too often fails to believe women when they say they are in pain.

The Pain Fugue asserts the legitimacy of a condition, and acts as witness, resistance, and a call for empathy.