Film Categories: Mental Health

  • Forever Hold Your Peace

    Live actions with hand scratched sound, this film presents the frustration of feeling the need to speak with nothing to say. Filmed by the artist’s husband at the time, the film also relates to subtle complexities of communication within marriage.

  • Sparklene

    This is a story of the transformative effects of sparking, speculative frenzy. It questions whether embodied contact with objects and living creatures can occur outside fixed clichés of perception so that eyes can have multi-sensory effects.

  • Accidental, The

    This film is about inappropriate attention to sensory experiences other than the visual while driving and in response to an accident. Sound, touch and taste may disrupt safety to others and might threaten public order when not kept in check by the dominion of the visual. Dogs know all about this.

  • New Atlantis

    Landscape and drive-thrus transformed by real estate speculation are reanimated with magical thinking and an embodied language written in breath on a windshield. “A bird’s mind can hold only one sample. How to come here and how to return. This loop has been corrupted by blooming rot. The cat knows the curse to reset it.”

  • All Fall Down

    “All Fall Down” is an experimental documentary that takes as its starting point a nineteenth century farmhouse in Southern Ontario, Canada, and asks the question “what has been here before?” The film weaves together a complex temporal structure that juxtaposes the lives of two figures, one historical (Nahneebahweequa: a nineteenth century aboriginal woman and land rights activist) and the other contemporary (an ex-pat drifter and father of the filmmaker’s step-daughter) across two hundred years. “All Fall Down” explores these characters through a variety of archival materials: diaries, landscape paintings, photographs, heritage films, poems, phone messages, maps, historical reenactments, songs) that…

  • I’m Sorry, Sterling

    Poet RM Vaughan muses on his relationship to 50s film noir tough guy hunk Sterling Hayden, and why he cannot make his life more like a 50s film noir masterpiece. Created by video/internet artist Jared Mitchell, the film inserts Vaughan into the rain-dappled, shadowed and dreamy world of film noir – turning the poet into Hayden’s moll, lover, and dumb broad. A film about living your life “in the right movie,” queer projection onto mainstream cinema, and the collision of fantasy and reality.

  • irma Vep

    Mad pursuit for the wild life leads to an outrageously messy story about a cover girl who encounters dangerous magazine cut-outs. irmaVep / Stars the bride of quietness / In a flowery tale, / Who will transform thy shape, / Leaving behind unanswered questions: / What maidens loath? / What mad pursuit? / What struggle to escape? / What wild ecstasy? Selected Screenings: Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival, 2009 (Toronto, Canada); Cucalorus Festival, 2009 (Wilmington, NC)

  • Carpet Diem

    A two-minute creative documentary made of two unaltered still photos: one taken by a cell phone, the other by a professional Hollywood paparazzo. Selected Screenings: Inside Out Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, 2009 (Toronto, ON); CFC Worldwide Short Film Festival, 2009 (Toronto, ON)

  • Oh Me 2

    An animated essay which is a joint effort by both the artist and his son – a psychology prof. – to “describe” what it’s like to be living with manic depression and creating under its influence.

  • Case of Rape, A

    A victim is tormented by questions and self doubt. Adapted from a story of her rape as told by a friend. The animation is in the form of a public service announcement.