Like so many others, Pia is confronted with a life-changing question: “Who am I?” While some, in search of their true selves, take up new hobbies, step away from work, or return to the comfort of family and friends, Pia insists on her right to be different. Different from her unhelpful therapists, glorifying parents, and stigmatizing colleagues.

After her stay in a psychiatric clinic, Pia, in her mid-twenties, begins the process of reintegrating into her old, familiar life. A life defined by normality. People with normal jobs, normal families, and normal expectations of what life should be. But shouldn’t it be just as valid to be different?

The right to otherness and the weight of societal expectations becomes the central theme of “How to be normal”. A film by Florian Pochlatko, in which mental health is no longer treated as a private matter but staged as a public spectacle. Everyone seems to have an opinion about how Pia should behave after her treatment and what might help her most in this moment—but has anyone actually asked Pia herself?