Film Categories: Mental Health

  • Severed

    Unable to cope with the murder of his identical twin, a young man resorts to disturbing measures to restore their severed bond.

  • Jason’s Dad

    Days after his father’s suicide, Jason, a disgruntled teenager, intercepts a series of text messages from what appears to be a mistress. Using his father’s cell phone he sets up a meeting to confront the woman for answers. When they meet neither one are prepared to face the real truth about Jason’s dad.

  • Arrhythmia

    Footage from a cardiac catheterization, intertwined with a recording of a telephone conversation and old 8mm home films, tell the story of a mother’s conflicting desire to escape a poor marriage by returning to her homeland, despite the possibility of being victimized at the hands of the government upon her return due to a past incident. “Arrhythmia” is an intimate piece about family, distance and identity.

  • Film Concerto in Hanging Major

    As the heartbroken Papageno from The Magic Flute is on the brink of ending his life, we pause to examine his options. “Film Concerto in Hanging Major” is a highly informative, yet darkly humorous, guide into the most effective ways of committing suicide.

  • Jack

    This is the official music video for the U.S. Girls song ‘Jack’, the first single off of the album Gem (FatCat Records, 2012). In the video, a sequined woman (played by Meghan Remy) sings from the perspective of Jack the Ripper, confounding the relationship between looker and looked at, predator and prey. This glam-inspired video was befittingly shot on a Hitachi FP-22, 3-tube vintage camera by an all-female crew. It plays on classic images of American femininity, and the lyrics of the song contribute a subtext of the misogynistic serial killer’s gaze. With references to Kenneth Anger’s ‘Puce Moment’ and…

  • Forever

    Part dream, part documentary, Forever weaves history and hedonism to form a world of dandelions, hypnosis, bicycles and memory. Created from experiments replicating the effects of radiation on film, the piece explores the nature of airborne radioactivity and brings us from a woman’s story of adolescence, to a bicycle race, to life in the Soviet Union. A bricolage of pop culture and personal histories, Forever is about looking for dandelions and finding atoms. As the opening film of Lion, Forever employs spray and smudge techniques to explore the concept of airborne radioactive contaminants and how they travel in open air.…

  • Water

    A film exploring the impulsive nature of radiation, Water is the last dream of a dying man. Using brilliant blue and black images from cross-processed 16mm, the film explores the end of the 3 Chernobyl divers – three men who sacrificed their lives to drain a pool of radioactive hydrogen peroxide beneath the burning reactor no. 4 during the Chernobyl disaster. Mutating out of darkness in to a piercing blue, Water drifts under the surface of consciousness and into final memories. The full-length version of the Lion series is available through the CFMDC.

  • Sodium Lamp Study

    A technical experiment about exposure and an interview of a woman’s experience with radioactive ablation therapy for thyroid cancer, Sodium Lamp Study is a meditation on exposure, treatment, and the unseen emotional effects of radiation. The visual element of Sodium Lamp Study explores the photographic concept of reciprocity failure – when the exposure of an image is separated in to multiple exposures rather than a single exposure with the same light strength, the results become unreliable. In a similar way, patients facing the treatment of thyroid cancer are presented with an option of a single dose of radioactive iodine, or…

  • Cowboys and Iodine

    An attempt to tame the atomic frontier, Cowboys and Iodine is a fever dream involving the masculine bravado and seldom-discussed gender shaming used to encourage men to volunteer as liquidators for the cleanup of the Chernobyl disaster. Employing dip, spray and smudge techniques to replicate the different methods of radiation exposure the men experienced. The film also employs a split negative/reversal process to reflect the methods that waves of radiation enter the body. Cowboys and Iodine blends subtext, social stigma and personal aspiration to construct the internal contemplation of a man going to war with the atom. The full-length version…

  • Lion

    A project spanning three years of production and research, Lion explores the Chernobyl disaster and the nature of radiation, recollection, and personal history. Lion navigates atomic fallout and a girl’s adolescence, a dream before death, radiation as a cause and a cure for cancer, masculine bravado, feminine obsession, a trip to Chernobyl amidst the death of a matriarch, and the destruction of memory. This conceptually arranged film album is composed of seven works on 16mm and hand processed with darkroom techniques that mimic the effects of radiation on film. The series combines memory, history, pop culture and technical experiments to create visual representations…