Film Categories: Mental Health

  • Quatuor de l’exil, Le

    This film tells us the story of four francophones, aged 17 to 19, who have come from the war-torn and hunger-ravaged country of Somalia. Having just arrived in Canada, they are searching for cultural reference points that allow them to reconstruct their universe. But the way they live marginalizes them and they do not always recognize themselves in modernity. How can they reconcile old and new, past and present, myth and reality? It is this quest for remembrance, identity and freedom which the filmmaker seeks to capture.

  • Rage Net

    A hand-painted film which deals with the mind’s visual absorption after the fact of blind rage. (Printed twice on the reel.)

  • Rumours of War

    “Rumours of War” is a playful look, through a jaundiced eye, of the street preachers, Christians and charismatics that populate the streets of downtown Toronto. Through interviews, live action, text and montage, the filmmaker reveals the individuals behind the sermons, allowing their voices to be heard beyond the confines of their sidewalk pulpits. Ignoring foul weather, hecklers and occasional violence, the evangelists tirelessly exhort the faithless to repent before it’s too late.

  • Scientific Girl, The

    “The Scientific Girl” explores the “outbreak” of 1940’s Hollywood films featuring mentally ill heroines – Olivia de Havilland in “The Snake Pit,” for example. By tracing the treatment of hysterical women in the 1890s, our heroine, the Scientific Girl, reveals how women’s problems have been stereotyped and how the “evil-seductress effect” works. “An intelligent attempt to span generations and cinematically tie together the treatment of hysteria in women as a form of entertainment…an intriguing subject.” – Cinema Canada

  • Scissere

    A narrative formed from a young man’s unfiltered perception of a fragmented environment following his release from a psychiatric clinic. The film concentrates on his perception of three individuals – a drug addict, a scientist, and a young mother. The film is a study of the order in confusion, forcing the viewer to construct and decipher the inter-relatedness of the strands that constitute the story.

  • Sigmund Freud’s Dora

    In 1889, Sigmund Freud began treatment with an 18-year-old girl who was brought to him for analysis by her father after she had written a suicide note. Freud was eager to use this case to demonstrate the hypotheses laid out in his “Interpretation of Dreams,” but after only three months of treatment the young woman walked out, without being cured. Five years later, Freud published an account of this failed treatment, calling it a “Fragment of an Analysis” and giving his patient the name Dora – that of a servant in his household. Recently, Dora has been a focus for…

  • Sink or Swim

    Through a series of twenty-six short stories, a young girl recounts the events that shaped her childhood and formed her adult perceptions of fatherhood, family, work and play. The stories are told in a simple, direct manner, but are full of ambiguity, confused loyalties, and an apprehension of danger and loss. “I can think of no more corrosively moving refutation of the law of the father than Su Friedrich’s extraordinarily precise ‘Sink or Swim.’ Summoning her nerve, Friedrich rather fearlessly refines her previous researches into the unexplored area of memory, dream and desire.” – Ernest Larson Selected screenings: New York…

  • Smell of Burning Ants, The

    “The Smell of Burning Ants” is a haunting documentary on the pains of growing up male. It explores the inner and outer cruelties that boys perpetrate and endure. Through formative events of a boy’s life, we come to understand the ways in which men can become emotionally disconnected and alienated from their feminine side. The common dismissal that “boys will be boys” evolves into the chilling realization that boys frequently become angry, destructive, and emotionally disabled men. “The Smell of Burning Ants” illustrates how boys are socialized by fear, power and shame. The burning of ants is one of the…

  • Sweetblood

    “‘Sweetblood’’s chief elements include a flurry of family photos, a collage of Italian immigrant voices and a bottle of red. Expertly made, this memoir is Steve Sanguedolce’s hymn to his family, and his own secret history of the seventies.” – Toronto Festival of Festivals “Perhaps the most evocative short film in the program is Steve Sanguedolce’s ‘Sweetblood,’ which examines the strained relationship between the filmmaker and his emotionally detached father. A collage of family photographs and cryptic subtitles fills the screen while the voices of his family and his personal thoughts are heard. An emotionally stirring film in which the…

  • There, Try Alive…

    “There is a voice crying in the wilderness”, Catherine Clement and Hellen Cixous say, “the voice of the body dancing, laughing, shrieking, crying. Whose is it?” It is they say, “the voice of a woman, newborn and yet archaic, a voice of milk and blood, a voice silenced but savage.” Introduction of “The Newly Born Woman” by Hellen Cixous and Catherine Clement. This film is an experimental psychodrama in which a woman goes through an incredible inner journey in which all fear, confusion, desire and attempts are bound and conquered towards a better understanding of herself. The doors represent the…