Art Imitating Life Multi-Screening

Anything Helps

An altered suicide note travels throughout the city and affects struggling people in a positive way.

Directed by Dakota Blose

USA

Under the Dark Clouds

Under the Dark Clouds is a 2D mixed-media fantasy animation about visiting a dream world. It uses digitally hand-drawn character animation with watercolor stop-motion and crayon drawings as a background. The Main character, Stra, tends to sleep when she wants to escape from reality. One of the main characters, Beddy, lets Stra enter a dream world, where Stra faces herself and accepts her depression. This film addresses the idea of self-acceptance, and how dreams reflect our unconsciousness.

Directed by Kangmin Lim

USA

Left Opened

Left Opened is a poetry, improvised piano and improvised dance collaboration about the experience of anxiety.

Centered around a five-part narrative poem, this project was not about offering solutions, or about telling a hero's narrative that turns anxiety into a villain that we needed to beat down or destroy by the end. Collectively, we were very specifically interested in exploring the experience of anxiety; the sensations, melodies, metaphors, and movements we've associated with anxiety at different times in our lives.

Directed by Rick Etkin

Starring Christine Bissonnette, Craig Addy, Drew Temple, Vitantonio Spinelli

Canada

Circular

Experimental short film exploring the way negative thought patterns manifest in our heads.

Directed by Fraser Whitehead

Starring Tess Potiki

Australia

Reminiscence

What we have once enjoyed deeply we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.

Reminiscence is the third installment of Lucy's "Dancing For Jane" film series which is is an annual project intending to accumulate as a visual journey of grief & healing over time. After losing her mother Jane to breast cancer in 2014, Lucy is endeavouring to create a short dance film each year in tribute to her mum, marking the anniversary of her passing as well as reflecting on Lucy's personal journey with grief and loss.

When we lose somebody we love, it is natural to seek the emotional support they once provided to us in other people, relationships and circumstances when really the comfort we are seeking and ultimately our healing is already existent within us. The deepest bonds of love can not be broken, rather they become a part of us and are calling us to remember what is already there.

Directed by Lucy Doherty

Australia

Melancholia

A symbolic experiment contemplating the human condition's struggle with mental health.

Directed by Michael Amter

USA