Real life stories of the experience of living with mental illness
Canada, Italy, USA, UK
In the Shadows: Untold Stories of the Mental Health System
Animal Calling
The Town Crier (Il banditore)
8 Weeks To Happy
While We Wait
The Lucky Ones
This film highlights Breanna Ching's passion for change within the current mental health care model, delving into her advocacy work before the film switches to two true stories of women "failed by the system". Their faces aren't shown, because mental health is "in the shadows" — even still.
Directed by Breanna Ching
Starring Abigail Wollam, Gracie Wilson
Canada
The short documentary Animal Calling is an intimate portrait following a recently-graduated, young veterinarian, enjoying a rare and relaxing morning in her blissful country home. While she quietly prepares for her day, we're intermittently transported to her place of work as she reflects on the mental health crisis currently impacting the field of animal care, revealing the emotional and psychological challenges faced by those dedicating their lives to veterinary medicine.
Directed by Candice Dixon
Canada
The town crier was born from the meeting with Gennaro Muto, a kind of archetypal figure from Scampia, northern suburb of Naples. Gennaro tells about a neighborhood different from the cliché that over the years was built by national and international media. The main character, dreams to become a town crier, thanks to his ability to create wide relationships because of his inexhaustible energy and fantasy, that everyday are cultivated with the support of the associations of the quarter. Gennaro is a user of the mental health center in Scampia. He is also a member of the theatrical and pedagogical group Arrevuoto and on of the founder of the first Murga band in Naples, called Banda Baleno. So, he has managed to make creative paths in response to his disability. The short film "The town crier" is the last creative and irreverent invention, not conforming to any standard, born after the meeting with Gennaro and the visual ethnography. The short film became the occasion for a workshop to realize the dream to become a town crier, like a freedoms practice in spite of the social and urban constrictions due to mental disability.
Directed by Parsifal Reparato
Starring Gennaro Muto
Italy
Kallie has suffered from treatment resistant depression for fourteen years. Out of options and sick of dead ends she decides to seek an alternative therapy in the heart of the French Quarter, New Orleans through Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.
Eight Weeks to Happy is a journalistic styled documentary short that records Kallie's moods week by week as magnetic pulses attempt to refire the latent neurons in her brain.
The treatment is ultimately a success allowing her to have a quality of life she never thought possible, one free of depression.
Directed by Kallie Bryant
USA
A documentary exploring the Norfolk Mental Health service through the experience of 10 patients impacted by waiting lists that can run for years.
Directed by Alyssa Girvan
UK
The Lucky Ones is a poignant love story of Alexander and Timothy, a married couple diagnosed with Schizophrenia. Their life together gives a glimpse into what it means to survive with a mental disorder and how one unexpected event can upend their already precarious world. This film shows the audience a couple who love and support enough other that defies and breaks apart what society thinks about others living with a mental illness and hopefully removes some of the stigma and fear people have around a person living with a mental illness.
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