Film Categories: Mental Health

  • Hear Me

    A formal collage of various song bites that expresses feelings of anxiety and depression. Uses music and lyrics to describe struggles with mental health / finding hope. I collected lyrics for a couple months that I connected with and helped me understand and describe my struggles with mental health. Then I stitched them together in a poem of sorts. The poem as well as the imagery are jumpy and mimic what goes on in a spiral or panic attack (at least for me) as I move through a dark space and back toward light.

  • The Dandelion Club

    A gang of queer kids stylishly loiter about town. Pollinating. A collective resistance that collects at the margins of society and develops even on its fringes. No patch of concrete too solid to bloom through. An existence as a pest. A nuisance. And a fabulous one at that. Negotiating identity as: weed or flower?

  • Waiting (انتظار)

    A young woman journeys to visit her grandmother. What transpires between the unsaid and silence propels into a prolonged moment of tension and desires of connection. Image description: A young woman and her grandmother sit next to each other on a couch. They both look straight ahead with stony-faced expressions, not talking.

  • Cam Boy

    A student takes up sex camming as a means to pay his rent; he becomes good at it until one of his sex toys, whom he is friends with, wants to go to the next level.

  • still

    A meditation on holding on in isolation, made with a personal cell phone and limited equipment at the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic in Ottawa.

  • Wash Day

    As they get ready for the day, three young Black women discuss the public perception of their Blackness in relation to their cultivation of a strong sense of self. Wash Day is an intimate exploration into how private, domestic acts such as washing your hair or putting on makeup become a significant re-acquaintance with the body, before and after navigating the politics of one’s outwardly appearance. Image description: A Black woman’s hands cradle long dark braids as water washes over them.

  • The Story of the Dancing Heart

    A poetic, flowing Heart dances with ease day and night. A busy, curious Mind sets off on a journey to learn to dance as rhythmically and as elegantly as Heart. But the more desperate he becomes, the harder it gets. Maybe Mind will never encapsulate Heart’s lightness and innate delight. Or maybe music will show Mind the ways of the Heart.

  • Mach Stem

    Part one in a series, Mach Stem is an essay about skincare, depression, memory loss, and the atomic bomb. Formulated from a discarded master’s thesis film, Mach Stem records the shadow of a long depression and the process of convalescence. Exploring sites of research, memory, and legacy, the film travels between continents to piece together one’s own identity that was previously lost at sea.

  • Broth of Vigour

    A different kind of bone broth. A boiling broth stewed from science fiction, competitive cooking shows and the erotic recesses of the imagination, Broth of Vigour is a tonic for the body and mind.

  • ARIES

    A single window frame; a portal. As the circular nature of time begins to reveal itself, a new decade begins.