Film Categories: Mental Health

  • 3:48

    “‘3:48’ is a film about living and dying in Ontario. I reassembled newsfilm and other footage to write an allusive and associative history that suggests the laws of memory and the processes of dream. The images date from the late 1960s and early 1970s, and depict the everyday: garbage collection, a picket line, children playing in the snow, a building on fire. Most lack the age or resonance that might inject them with nostalgia. However, they do trace the outlines of the small ways we try to make life in this sad place better.” – Blaine Allan

  • X

    A profound and powerful experimental, personal film of one woman’s despair, rage and exhibitionism; a baroque fugue of identity chanting growing from women’s pain to a holistic, self-healing naming ritual.

  • Fires of Joanna, The

    Set against the bleak landscape of Depression-era Eastern Ontario, this film tells the story of Joanna McVeigh and her struggle to endure a harsh and unforgiving life. Epileptic since childhood and past the age of marriage, Joanna lives alone on a run-down farm with Frank, her alcoholic father. Bound by a promise to her dying mother and haunted by a dark and shameful childhood secret, Joanna illuminates her loneliness with secret imaginings and the pleasure of her one great gift, the ability to set fires with her mind. Joanna’s desire to break free from the confines of her lonely existence…

  • 62 Injections

    Get up, shower, shave, coffee, right? How about get up, jab finger, draw blood, give yourself a needle? Again and again … This film presents the daily routine of the film’s director, an insulin-dependent diabetic. The film records his morning regimen of blood sugar testing, needle preparation, and insulin injection, climaxing with a montage of a month’s worth of needles into various sites on his body. Afraid of needles? This won’t hurt a bit.

  • Island

    Alone on an island, a childlike man is haunted by the shadows, reflections and imprints of his own body, thus beginning the descent from innocence to madness.

  • Slip

    A therapist and her client have the same dream. For both women, its is moment of celluloid synchronicity.

  • Book of Knives

    “Book of Knives” is based on seven psychiatric case histories dating from 1905 up to the present. These stories are linked through the interrogation of a modern day woman, Iris, who has murdered her plastic surgeon. “Book of Knives” is a short history of women, technology & madness in the twentieth century, and calls into question both the ethics and methodologies of western scientific enquiry.

  • Mothers of Me

    “‘Mothers of Me’ is a visually glorious, abstract study in which the filmmaker explores, partly out of fear, the women in her family, their history of insanity and their response to a repressive environment. Through the use of close-ups and fragmented composition we are compelled to participate in her examination.” – Stacey Donen, Toronto Intenational Film Festival, 1999 Awards: 2nd Prize Danzante de Plata, Festival de Cine de Huesca, Spain; Marian McMahon Award, Images Festival, 2001

  • So Beautiful

    A bittersweet love story about modern-day romance versus suicide. Late one night, a woman returns to the apartment she used to live in with her now ex-boyfriend. She knocks on the door and under the impression no one is home, lets herself in and begins to gather her belongings. On her way to the bathroom she passes the bedrom door and glimpses her ex-boyfriend’s naked, sleeping body. Then in the bathroom she finds an an emptied bottle of sleeping pills in the sink. She goes into the bedroom to confront him and during their dialogue they make up and fall…

  • Smack

    Part documentary, part fiction, and highly experimental, Steve Sanguedolce’s “Smack” follows the story of three brothers (Antonio, Sybil and Zed) as they try to find their way in the world. The brothers exercise their youthful autonomy in defiant ways, exploring all that is forbidden (drugs, crime, violence). Their teenage years are filled with unhealthy, dangerous and criminal behaviour that eventually begins to pull them apart. The stories are told by actual subjects talking about their own lives, and range from religious transformations to heroin overdoses; they are funny, frightening, horrifying and all real. Toronto-based director/cinematographer Steve Sanguedolce matches these interconnected…