Film Categories: Mental Health

  • Broken Tulips

    Edward Porris attends an appointment at a spa that caters to his specific tastes.

  • Films of Su Friedrich, The: Volume 5 – The Odds of Recovery

    After a twenty-year period of multiple illnesses and injuries, Friedrich turns the camera on herself as a way to analyze her chances for a happier, healthier life. In the process, she captures the frustration, tedium and petty annoyances of a revolving-door relationship with the medical establishment, while portraying the complicated web of emotions that accompany any medical problem. With humor and honesty, “The Odds of Recovery” uses the filmmaker’s medical history as a means to address a perennial human problem: the desire to avoid conflict and deny the need for radical change. “…plays with the genre of the self-portrait…all in…

  • Broken Telephone

    A surreal short film in which a young woman ponders the relationship she has with her own identity.

  • Faces West

    “Faces West” is a hand-processed dance film that explores the conflict between desire and inhibition, intimacy and distance. Created in collaboration between Rebecca Gruihn (Director) and Niomi Cherney (Choreographer/Performer), it takes the viewer to three city spaces that can be considered both public and private. The tensions of Cherney’s unique movement style are captured by Gruihn’s 16mm camera.

  • v=d/t

    v=d/t is the physics formula which calculates velocity by dividing the distance traveled by the time required to travel that distance. This film explores the possibility of measuring distances between loved ones through time zones. The sound track is comprised of personal and tragic phone messages left on voicemail when individuals could not connect due to great time zone differences, while the visual elements present simple and contemplative images of antique telephones.

  • Fallen Flags

    A layered tapestry of trains and underwater footage exploring the realms of fear death and transience, this film places the traces of human voices amidst the flickering light and shadows of empty passenger cars.

  • Three Part Harmony: Composition in RGB #1

    This experimental dance film employs a bastardized version of the 1930s’ three-strip Technicolor process. Shot entirely on black-and-white film through colour filters, the images were recombined into full colour through optical printing techniques, one frame at a time. The gestures in this dance work explore the psychological fracturing and reunification in representations of the female body.

  • Mechanical Memory

    Created from super 8 footage that was shot in the 1970s of the family dogs and the trains that my father worked on, this film explores the decay of memory and image. The super 8 film grew fungus while stored in a basement. It was then optically printed up to 16mm and slowed down so that the snowflake shaped fungus could be studied. Narration presents fragmented stories of childhood memories. This film was created as a source film, which was later physically cut up and reprinted with a flashlight to destroy the image and sound for the subsequent film “Mechanical/Animal…

  • Knowledge of Good and Evil

    “Knowledge of Good and Evil” is an abstract exploration of the tension surrounding women and stereotypical representations of their knowledge. This film was created from footage shot at Phil Hoffman’s independent imaging retreat (aka “the film farm”) in Ontario as well as from footage shot in Vancouver (where I had given myself the challenge of shooting 100 feet of film every month). All of the footage was hand-processed, and some of it was contact printed by hand and treated in baths of potassium ferricyanide. The final film was created through various optical printing techniques.

  • Playing Jacob

    Loosely exploring the historical weight of institutionalized religion in a postmillennial society, and its relationship to individual spirituality, the filmmaker places herself into the Jacob myth on the Pentateuch. She plays the role of Jacob in an attempt to come to terms with her religious upbringing, and her anxious ambivalence towards her own agnosticism. Inspired by the in-camera techniques of the early cinema of Meliese, the film and all of its special effects were shot and edited entirely in-camera in one take.