Film Categories: Mental Health

  • One Hundred Attempts to Make a Film About Depression

    Four years ago I began working on what was supposed to be a documentary about living with depression. In the end, if there is anything harder than having a conversation about depression, it is making a film about it. After numerous shoots, interviews, restarts, and stages of abandonment, I created this piece. The film is an attempt at translating the emotional state of depression, as I experience it. Filmed almost entirely on the Phantom slow motion camera at 1500 frames per second, 100 Attempts To Make a Film About Depression represents an ongoing struggle to be open about coping with…

  • A Celebration of Darkness

    A woman with a tortured past is triggered to take an unexpected walk down memory lane, she finds herself face-to- face with her inner child. Giving her a chance to make peace with her past. Does she find a way to celebrate darkness or does she become engulfed forever by it? In 2015, Jaene turned 40. This lead her to become introspective about her unusual life history. From a childhood of severe abuse, neglect, psychiatric institutionalization and being in care, she grew to become a street involved sex worker by 20. She met Elder, Isaac Day from Serpent River First…

  • Somnium Lapidum (Dream Stones)

    This stop-motion 16mm film offers an audiovisual meditation on the material animation of stones. The concept is inspired by Camillo Leonardi’s “Speculum Lapidum”, published in 1533, which describes the magical healing virtues of a variety of stones, categorized by colour. The character-based animated vignettes are inspired by the woodcuts in “De Hortus Sanitatis”, a natural history encyclopedia published in 1485, which details various methods of harnessing the power of gems. It was believed at the time that a given gem’s powers could be absorbed through focused viewing. Proposing an analogy between this belief and attraction to cinema, this film offers…

  • I Want To Kill Myself

    Contemplating suicide: a biography.

  • Mount Misery

    Emotionally drained after learning of the death of her long estranged sister, an elderly woman spends the day lost somewhere between her past and present and her conscious and subconscious mind. In this state, she ponders the inevitabilities of life, death and the hereafter. “Mount Misery” won Best Film prize at the Black International Cinema, Berlin film festival, 2017.

  • Experiments In Light

    This short explores light as a meditative state while encouraging the viewer to take a moment to be present within themselves. Taking footage from my narrative self portrait A Celebration of Darkness (2015) and recutting it to refocus on the various macro shots of crystals as an expansion on the theme of light and darkness. The images in this short was made possible by the LIFT/ImagineNATIVE 16 mm Film Mentorship in 2015, it’s post production was funded by the Ontario Arts Council Access and Development grant in 2016 and completed as part of my Media Artist in Residence with Workman…

  • Heartbreak

    “Heartbreak” is a tribute to black mothers. It was written and produced in response to the constant threat of brutality they and their children (particularly boys) live under. Through poetry and the voice of a 5-year-old boy it relates the very real physical and psychological toll that violence has on black bodies and black souls.

  • Mino-bimaadiziwin (The Good Life)

    Mino-bimaadiziwin (The Good Life) came out of the Artist for Film residency at Artscape Gibraltar Point. I was excited about First Story’s walking tour with Elder Carolyn King. I was only able to participate with the aid of a wheelchair and allow others to push me around, it was my first time in a wheelchair. I documented this walk from that perspective with this manual timelapse on Super 8. Reconciling myself as a mixed-race indigenous Colombian settler “walking the red road” while being a person who lives with physical disabilities. Learning to live mino-bimaadiziwin as a settler to Turtle Island…

  • Sum (Heart)

    Based on ideas of Zen Buddhism and rooted in the 7 Grandfather teachings, Sum (Heart) is a rumination on death, grief and letting go. Starting out as a visual mourning song to Wendy Babcock, Mr Toqui Wong and Jack, empty landscapes represent the yearning for the company of dead friends. Water becomes a metaphor for grief and mourning, the ebbs and flows of nature reminds us of the cycle of life which transforms into a stark ode to a new day and new beginnings. I put all my sadness, prayers and hope into this trilogy while still aching for their…

  • Why Must The Sun Go Down?

    When a little nightingale wonders to herself why the sun must go down at night, she decides to embark upon a journey. She first meets the Sunkeeper, and asks him why he sets the sun at night. The Sunkeeper explains that it is so the Starmaker knows when it’s time to put stars in the sky. The Nightingale’s journey then leads her to the Starmaker, the Flowermaker, and other celestial creatures of our world… At last she discovers that the sun must go down so that it can rise again in the morning, and that, just like everything else in…