Film Categories: Mental Health

  • Performing Girl

    Performing Girl is a short documentary about D’Lo, a queer, transgender, Tamil Sri Lankan American actor, writer, director and comic who got his start at age 11, performing for his family and classmates in the desert town of Lancaster, CA. Animations, home movies, and family snapshots paint the portrait of his personality. In interviews and clips from his performances, D’Lo and his parents explain how his identity and their relationship has changed over the last twenty years.

  • Outside The Ring

    Through the lens of a unique violence recovery program in Toronto, this documentary provides a glimpse into the lives of women and transgendered survivors of violence and the impact Boxing has had in their healing. The film follows the ways in which participants challenge social constructs that dictate that women must not experience their own feelings of aggression. The Toronto Newsgirls Boxing Club is the first all-women’s boxing club in North America. In 2007, a small group of women boxers active in social justice created Shape Your Life, a project designed for women and trans survivors of violence. The goal…

  • Persistence of Vision

    Persistence of Vision is the story of a man who, against his doctor’s advice, was determined to make short films while he still could. From age 16 to age 30, Lorne Marin embarked on a burgeoning career as an experimental filmmaker. Now, thirty years later, his body dictates most of his life choices, yet his artistic urges remain. Lorne has lived the past fifty odd years with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease often described as “tunnel vision.” Today, his vision is limited to a circle about one inch in diameter. Persistence of Vision showcases the films Lorne made thirty…

  • Doom

    Doom is a slapstick caper of a kidnapping turned on its head; a farcical take on Stockholm Syndrome. A group of businessmen and bankers are corralled from the streets of their work for the purpose of detention, observation and ultimate indoctrination by a group of unlikely bandits. Their captivity initially frightens them but through the treatment by their strange yet benevolent captors, the men quickly view their corporate transgressions with disdain as they reject the freedom they are eventually offered.

  • Float

    My goal as a filmmaker is to provide a positive voice for the trans,genderqueer, androgynous & gender-fluid folks not yet represented on screen, documenting our history, serving as a call to action to be recognized and respected by society at large, and forcing our culture to evolve. Float is inspired by experiences I’ve had swimming with other trans people, which is a very rare and special thing because of the complicated relationship lots of trans folks have with their bodies, especially in the context of swimming, bathing suits etc. This film is a symbol of hope for the community and…

  • Head Cleaner

    Hand-drawn and digital animation, analog video effects, re-photography and video feedback transform images issuing from an apparently malfunctioning machine. Materials and objects, in varying physical or mediated transfigurations, pervade each scene, as relics from one moment in a transformation from girlhood to womanhood. Tongue-in-cheek commentary on entertainment technology’s fraught relationship to individual agency and identity, and its role in the standardization of expression and behaviour, underlies a loosely suggested coming-of-age narrative.

  • Confidente (Confident)

    This is me.

  • Mathematics of a Lesbian Kiss

    Shot entirely on iPhones 5S and 5C, in this non-linear narrative two women contemplate the similarities between a lesbian bar in San Jose, Costa Rica and their experiences of the dyke bar scene in Toronto decades earlier.

  • Famous Diamonds

    A kaleidoscopic search for desire trapped inside a volcano. Famous Diamonds is a short film that studies lies, love, and desire by weaving together a diary narrative and an exploding icon. Composed of various image-making techniques, Famous Diamonds is a hand-painted, hand-processed tour of the dissolution of one’s internal image of desire.

  • Spermwhore

    This short film is a queer, feminist and experimental work that began in 2009 and came to fruition in the spring of 2013. Spermwhore is a queer experimental film about unwanted childlessness in a world where normative heterosexual relationships dictate who can become parents and in what way. When it comes to reproduction our merciless bodies reduce us to merely a set sex or given gender. But the longing for children is not limited to our bodies, and the possibility of pregnancy can be gifted, shared and undertaken together.