Film Categories: Mental Health

  • I Must Be Going

    A young finger puppet retrieves a letter left behind by her recently deceased brother.

  • Every Day Burns

    Award winning pole dancer, Sada Velasquez, addresses the familial and social stigma she must overcome in order to pursue her passion for dance. Everyday Burns is a short documentary exploring one artist’s journey towards self expression and community empowerment. Every day Sada overcomes physical limitations, personal doubts and moral perceptions of others in order to create a safe space for folks to explore their sensual freedom.

  • Full Moon Darkness

    A painful but enlightening film on the controversial subject of mental illness – or more particularly, the myth of mental illness. It is a frightening piece of work in that it asks us to assume responsibility for ourselves, our actions. How, after listening to Dr. Thomas Szasz, can we blame someone else anymore? Equally frightening is the realization that mental illness could touch our lives, not just someone else’s. Without attempting to give an answer, “Full Moon Darkness” raises many valid questions – questions we should ask ourselves at least once.

  • Tidal Phenomena

    Moon & sun. Ebb & flood. Wild & calm. Created conceptually as a full wall installation, but can be screened as a film as well.

  • disconnected

    Experimental rumination on depression. Inspired by Lost Connections by Johann Hari and Moving Through Depression by Laurel Swenson

  • Private View

    A view out my window and worries in my head. — A PRIVATE VIEW is a site-specific collective screening series curated by John Woods and created as a part of Iris Film Collective’s IN HOUSE series. What is private space and what is public? In the subdivided landscape of Vancouver privacy can be evasive, but each of us views our home as our castle and our homes’ windows give us a unique vantage point that is ours and ours alone. Iris member John Woods gave a roll of expired colour film stock to each of the members of the collective…

  • Gay As In Happy: A Queer Anti-Tragedy

    An award-winning experimental autoethnographic documentary about queer joy, resistance, and resilience in the face of abuse, trauma, and transphobia.

  • Green and Red, But Terracotta Red

    We are looking through the mirror of time, into distorted memories, while several narrators tell us about the most vivid colours in their dreams. The film consists of a collage of 16mm found footage that I further processed and decayed using a gentle combination of bleaching techniques. This process allowed me to partially lift the emulsion from the film base and re-shift it and re-position it by hand. Faces are warped, homes collapse, memories fade and blur.

  • L’Arrière-Pays

    An autobiographical fable at the cross-section between SCI-FI and Memory Film. The film explores the journey of two dreamers trapped between Past and Present, between Dream and Reality. It combines excerpts from an immigration journal, found text and images suspended in a dystopian dark space.

  • COPING

    A bunch of monsters are trying to relax after a long day of work.