Film Categories: Mental Health

  • back home

    back home follows filmmaker, Nisha Platzer’s pursuit to get to know her older brother, Josh, twenty years after he took his own life. As she connects with the friends who knew him best as a teen, a complex portrait emerges. Through intimate recollections re-imagined on Super8 and 16mm film, and lyrical images hand-processed with plants, seaweed, soil and ashes, ‘back home’ floats between memory and present time in a fragmented meditation on identity, grief and loss: illuminating the transformative power of healing in community.

  • Dear Friend, Where Have You Gone?

    For Jayden Martin, art is more than just a hobby. It’s his escape, his passion, and his lifeline. But as an artist in the small, rural community of Englehart, Ontario, Jayden’s dreams of making it big seem almost impossible. Despite growing up with divorced parents and struggling with addiction, mental health, and suicide, he remains determined to succeed. “Dear Friend, Where Have You Gone?” offers a rare glimpse into Jayden’s world as he navigates the challenges of small-town life and grapples with his own inner demons. This powerful documentary is an inspiring reminder of human resilience and the transformative power…

  • Landmarks of Memory

    A tattoo ritual and hookah session memorializes a pre-war flower shop. After seeing its storefront in archival footage of the Lebanese Civil War, a first-generation daughter seeks information and connection to place. Scenes of 1976 Beirut are paired with today’s developed landscape, while roses are etched and coconut coals burn in a snowy diasporic setting.

  • Don’t Take My Joy Away

    In the Shatila Palestinian camp in Lebanon, two friends, Omar and Omar, find moments of joy amid hardship until sudden violence forces them to confront loss and survival.

  • Adieu Ugarit

    In 2012, Mohamad had witnessed his best friend gunned down by an armed militia on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria; the blood spilled into the lake contaminated his memory. Ten years later, the reflections on the Laurentian waters bring back Mohamad’s trauma. I asked him if he’d like to dig out the memories, to repair the pain by retreating for a few days into the most distressing calm possible for him. He tells us about death, immigration and anger. We wonder how and why we should tell this story.

  • Aunt Harriet

    Aunt Harriet is a meditative moving portrait exploring introspection, healing, and aging. Set against the backdrop of rural Ontario it deepens the memory of Black lives, bridging past and present – history and myth.

  • Never Sleep

    Muna is a timid nonbinary teenager with the ability to communicate with the spirit world through her dreams. Following the sudden death of their father Ibrahim, they chooses to stop sleeping to avoid having to confront his restless spirit. When Muna’s estranged aunt Naja re-enters their life, their collective grief meets the turbulent spirits of their ancestors, and the two family members must decide whether to remain comforted by avoidance or face their fear of emotional vulnerability head on. With Naja’s guidance, Muna manages to forge a path towards rewriting her understanding of memory, loss, legacy and familial responsibility

  • I … Dreaming

    Music by Joel Haertling and Stephen Foster. This is a setting-to-film of a “collage” of Stephen Foster phrases by composer Joel Haertling. The recurring musical themes and melancholia of Foster refer to “loss of love” in the popular “torch song” mode; but the film envisions a re-awakening of such senses-of-love as children know, and posits (along a line of words scratched over picture) the whole psychology of waiting. (SB)

  • I Will Not Think about Death Anymore

    “I Will Not Think about Death Anymore” is a dramatic film about a Jewish lesbian who is obsessed with worries about dying following the death of a friend to AIDS. The fears triggered by this event bring on anxiety attacks common to women at the beginning of a healing process from sexual abuse. The story revolves around an internal adventure and fantasy, where Death becomes a butch dyke in the supermarket. The themes of healing, sexual abuse, dying, and panic attacks intertwine with Jewish identity, and the reclaiming of Jewish ritual for gay and lesbian audiences.

  • I’m Happy, You’re Happy, We’re All Happy, Happy, Happy, Happy

    Velcrow Ripper defines his film, which took four years to make, as “an exploration of a fool’s subjective vision as it becomes warped by society, a gradual transition from dream to nightmare… a cardboard parody, blatantly staged and simplistic.”