Hayley Anne Nash’s short film Make Up Your Mind is exactly the kind of thing I get really excited about seeing in the submissions. It’s a movie purposefully made by strong women, about strong women. It’s sometimes funny, but still serious and sensitive in its portrayal of mental health. It’s a genre film—with elements of science fiction grounded in contemporary society and reality. In many ways, it’s kind of an outlier in the bulk of our entries.
The film’s premise is very clever in that though it’s simple, it offers many possibilities, some of them kind of fun. A young woman struggling with her mental health must decide whether or not to buy a new brain from a soothing saleswoman who has had her brain replaced herself. As the potential buyer slowly begins to piece together what brought her to this state, the narrative also becomes ambiguous as to what is reality and what is a product of her “malfunctioning” brain.
Hayley Anne Nash was very animated during our interview about the importance of capturing women’s voices in film. One thing she illuminated for me is that of the many plays you could make on the title “Make Up Your Mind,” one that seemed especially important to her to show is that people who are actually very depressed can sometimes make themselves up so nobody could tell they were suffering from the outside. The young woman in the film seemed like such a person, who by all outward appearances was a successful and talented dancer whose brain “went bad.” Hayley’s not going to tell you what she thinks actually happens in the end of the movie, though—she wants you to make up your own mind.
You can watch Make Up Your Mind in Shorts Block No. 4 of the online festival: https://watch.eventive.org/mentalfilmness2022/play/633f0d67e7c22000291085fc
And check out an interview with Hayley Anne Nash here:
https://mentalfilmness2022.eventive.org/eventive.org/mentalfilmness2022interviews
Mental Filmness 