Just ONE more day to watch the Mental Filmness virtual fest and just a couple more highlights—but y’all in the States get an extra hour head-start due to Daylight Savings Time! Woo!
I’ll admit it, I’m always a little skeptical when a film about mental health ends on the note of therapy implying “now they’re getting therapy/seeking help, it’s all good.” Of course, it depends on the film and the context, and sometimes that particular ending seems very redeeming and well-earned, so I don’t mean to knock it. However, as a lot of us know, therapy is often the beginning of very hard work, not the magic bullet. Sometimes it makes you feel worse before it makes you feel better. Sometimes it doesn’t work at all. Sometimes different types of therapy, or different therapists, work better at different times in your life. It’s all so complicated.
I loved that the short film Sobriety clearly showed that therapy is hard work, and maybe it doesn’t always work. Sometimes I would bristle when my therapist kept asking, again and again, “And how do you feel about that?” and the main character Isley does here, too. This short film is a simple, no-frills, dramatic set piece, but it captures the actual reality of therapy—the awkwardness, sometimes unwelcome probing, and clenched defensiveness, better than many pieces I’ve seen.
Perhaps what I loved the most about writer-director Kina Johnson’s vision is it reconciled two concepts that—as an outsider, I’ve just heard—-are often in conflict with each other: black therapy and the black church. Here is a young black woman in therapy (with another black woman), discussing alcoholism, abandonment, and the occasional redemption she feels with her faith, all with some skepticism. That’s the kind of nuance you just rarely see on screen.
You still have through tomorrow evening, 11/3, to catch Sobriety in the virtual festival: https://watch.eventive.org/mentalfilmness2024/play/6704b2b8dd02d60047462b6c/66f08b2c99e92b003a2e472d
