Film Categories: Mental Health

  • Dead Time

    Innovative and challenging, “Dead Time” is an investigation into the lives of four young people who grapple with drugs, crime, prostitution, family and ultimately hope for their future. Beautifully hand-processed and with an incredible soundtrack, “Dead Time” combines documentary, narrative and experimental elements into a fascinating whole. Selected Screenings: 2006 Rotterdam International Film Festival

  • Time We Killed, The

    “The Time We Killed” is a lush B&W experimental narrative that portrays the life and imaginings of a writer unable to leave her New York City apartment. Robyn Taylor tries to comprehend and fight her growing agoraphobia by looking into her own past and confronting the world events of the present (from a murder-suicide next door to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq). Robyn’s obsessive ruminations threaten to drive her deeper into the solitude of an illusory world, until a personal encounter with death prompts her to leave the safety of home once again. Documentary material, scripted and improvised scenes are…

  • tangly wood

    “Tangly wood” is the story of Loupe, a young puppet artist who spends her days collecting found objects to create her art. One day, she finds something that brings back a memory and drives her into a frenzy of painting and creation.

  • Film Scroll

    “This Super 8 film was first presented as part of a ritual performance where I am naked and pull a white piece of fabric out of myyoni, pin it up and project the film onto it from reverse, while speaking the words on the film. The performance was part of a collective recreation of Carolee Schneeman’s ‘Interior Scroll.’ Each of us did a personal variation based on her 1975 performance. Schneeman’s piece included a letter to a filmmaker who criticized her work. My ‘letter’ is to an ex-partner who criticized me and my work, leaving me with feelings of inadequacy…

  • Good Stuff

    “Good Stuff” is a dark comedy about an alienated, gothic private school girl who discovers that she has a terminal illness. The film finds irony and humour in dealing with the cards fate has dealt you. Awards: Best Short Film, Chicago International Film Festival; Bronze Award, Houston WorldFest

  • Walnut Grove, mon amour

    After the death of his mentally ill father, artist RM Vaughan attempts to come to terms with the event by reconstructing his father’s emotional responses to the maudlin 70’s television program “Little House on the Prairie.” A blackly humourous meditation on death and grief, punctuated by crying scenes from the famously teary, famously cheesy television classic.

  • Hate

    Using his own lumpy body as a template, artist RM Vaughan explores differing reactions by various audiences to the blunt reality of having a non-commodifiable body in the age of supermodels. Alternately scathing and self-deprecating, “Hate” dishes out (and takes) some unhappy truths about “beauty” and art.

  • Rx

    A young gay man in a tiny Toronto apartment experiences a nervous breakdown, causing him to obsessively arrange and re-arrange his large knick-knack collection. Based on a true story, “Rx” is a bittersweet, funny chronicle of a mind turned frantic by fear, worry and novelty paperweights.

  • Attack of the Naïve: Ages Four to Twenty-One in Thirteen Unlucky Vignettes

    A confessional documentary on the artist’s schooling in love from the cradle to the crib. Scenes from movies, television shows and commercials are processed through analogue video techniques to yield a pop-art sensible understanding of the North-American Love Experience.

  • Finite, The

    “The Finite” lays bare the ephemeral nature of family, home and life on earth through a combination of home movies and archival footage from a science documentary. The two forms of imagery entwine along a common and inescapable course toward destruction, revealing the gravity of personal loss. Selected screenings: Toronto International Film Festival, 2004; CFC Worldwide Short Film Festival, 2006