Film Categories: Mental Health

  • Emergence

    “Emergence” is a video installation created to counter the violence of blackface in its representation of Blackness. This piece re-asserts the beauty of Blackness and challenges the reductive nature of contemporary Canadian blackface through extreme close-ups of black faces in all their diversity. Shot in extreme slow motion and projected by two projectors at a large scale on two screens, the images appear to be stills at first, but reveal themselves over time to be moving. These parts of lips, noses, eyes, posit the face as a signifying landscape. Serene images contrast with others that depict faces and arms pressed…

  • Silvia in the Waves / Silvia dans les vagues

    Noa struggles to honor the identity of his recently deceased parent while his mother tries to uphold the appearance of a conventional family. Grief and fantasy entwine to reveal the complex relationship between history and erasure, identity and memory.

  • Protector

    “Protector” is the first in a series of short documentaries that explores Osborne’s relationship with their uncle/godfather and his experiences with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), institutionalization, and working in Mental Health.”Protector” attempts to portray a person living with DID in an authentic and multi-faceted way. This documentary was funded by the Ontario Arts Council.

  • The Shallow End

    Christian, a 20-yr-old swim teacher, is having a hard time recovering from an incident where one of his students almost drowns on his watch.

  • Cold Hands

    In an effort to make friends in high school, Lucas finds himself in a position that compromises his safety. In the aftermath, he realizes that the support he seeks is not guaranteed.

  • HOLE

    Mo is an adult with Autism Spectrum Disorder. They spend a lot of time in their brain. Today, a hole started following them.

  • Birthday Suit

    A remake of the seminal Canadian feminist art tape by Lisa Steele. Featuring Lexi Tronic.

  • Breakdown

    I stay home one Saturday night to clean my back patio which I have been avoiding for months due to an ongoing mental health crisis. The only way I am able to clean is to make a performance of it.

  • HOSER

    This video was constructed in response to my experience of sexual assault and linked to the data collection/research I was doing shortly thereafter in publicly accessible community discourses of sero-conversion (pozzing) fetish, which have since received some scholarly attention in the Academy in the Social Sciences in relation to HIV acquisition/prevention and Queer theory. This tape is a reflection upon ideas of disclosure, self-determination, self-loathing, and informal support networks.