Film Categories: Mental Health

  • Akin

    “Akin” marks the first creative collaboration between Toronto-based artist Chase Joynt (Everyday to Stay) and NYC-based filmmaker Brooke Sebold (Red Without Blue). With haunting suburban visuals backed by the rich sounds of Toronto based-band Ohbijou, “Akin” powerfully engages in a relationship between an Orthodox Jewish mother and her transgender son as they navigate silent secrets of a shared past. Hauntingly beautiful. Rarely have I watched a film that is such a perfect union of parsimony and punch. It left me breathless. – Michelle Stone Perfectly timed and sequenced, “Akin” is so resolutely personal in it’s detailing. Joynt points to a…

  • Quiet

    Ali must lie and say she is her wife Sam’s sister so that she can be with Sam in the hospital because gay marriage is not legally recognized in the small Texas town where they live. Reluctant to listen to the doctor’s opinions about Sam’s condition, Ali loses herself in the couple’s memories: their first meeting, their first date and the day before Sam’s accident. Simultaneously, the hospital situation comes to a head when Nurse Lucy realizes their true relationship. Ali must confront those who would keep her from Sam as well her own fears of letting go. Selected screenings:…

  • Teens Like Phil

    Inspired by the alarming increase in real-life tragedies involving high school bullying and suicide, “Teens Like Phil” tells the story of a gay teen, Phil, and one of his classmates, Adam, who brutally bullies him. The film explores the complicated and painful circumstances surrounding this relationship in an effort to better understand the roots of this epidemic. Phil’s story is ultimately a tale of survival and transcendence from this cycle of abuse.

  • Our Protection

    “I’m watching you watching me, watching you watching me, watching you watching me. You hit bodies, while we hit streets, say it’s for our protection, when was just your decision” “Our Protection” is a music video for the band LAL for their 4th CD release. The song and the video are inspired by the G20 protests of 2010 in Toronto. Animation, mixed with real time photo and clips of protests, protesters, police violence and LAL, gives you a glimpse into the reality of loss of civil liberties we are facing more and more. Soon we won’t be allowed to dance…

  • Transit

    Undressing the human body either exposes a person to degradation or prepares him for beatification. The nude in western imagery draws a great deal of its power from the story of the passion and the image of Mary, and eroticism involves a transit between dressing and undressing in a world in which a god has become sexed. Transit is a series of 16 mm experiments in film documentation. The first of its three primary performances concerns the nude, the second blood sacrifice, and the last the passion of Christ.

  • Dr. Bish Remedies

    From Ross Lipman’s “personal ethnographies” series, an informal visit with legendary filmmaker Bruce Baillie at his home on Camano Island in Washington State. “From the lone transcendent biker riding the two-lane highway of nightmares in 1964’s Mass for the Dakota Sioux to 1970’s Quick Billy, Baillie blazed a path through nothing less than the American consciousness itself, closing the cycle with the Quixotic epigram “Ever Westward Eternal Rider!” As the admonishment warns, the journey continues, and endpoints are illusionary – only movement is of essence. –“Whither Bruce Baillie?”, Ross Lipman, 2010

  • Cuki Colorinchi Evolution

    A masked crochetist shows us his sudden immersion into crochet art. Spanish with English subtitles

  • Happy

    The quest for happiness dictates the shape of many lives in the world. Some find religion, some seek love, but all are searching to be happy. “Happy” moves through hand-processed 16mm film to explore the intersection of happiness, apostasy, and love. “Happy” considers the fiction of happiness and what it truly means, how it is proselytized in the church, media, and each other. Can simply smiling bring about an emotional change? Can being told to be happy make you happy? Has anyone told you that god loves you?

  • Breaking and Entering

    Adapted from a short story of the same name by Canadian author Andrew Pyper, “Breaking and Entering” is a poetic parable of a young man coming to terms with the death of his father. The film was near completion at the time of Hull’s death and was subsequently finished by The Estate of Andrew Hull.

  • Auto Portrait/Self Portrait Post Partum

    SPPP is an autobiographical experimental film exploring the ramifications of the devastating breakup of a romantic relationship. The film examines my own emotional responses in the context of how this experience is culturally represented. Painstakingly handmade, the visual and sound treatments evoke different phases of the relationship (from passionate attachment to escalating conflict to inexplicable breakup) and the various phases of the grieving process – from denial, to yearning, to anger, to final liberation: a healing release effected through the making of this film. A triptych of self-portraits-entire camera rolls, each subjected to different methods of extreme interventions on the…