Films to watch in the festival: Speaking of AI, there are two pretty relevant films in the festival, and again I placed them right next to each other.
I know there will probably be a wide variety of reactions to this, but yes, this year we are showing our very first AI-generated film. Written and directed by Arthur Machado with the assistance of Midjourney, Solace is a perfect platform for its surreal, colorful effects. In its sparse runtime of a few minutes it documents the confused, delusional, but often surreal and colorful dreams and visions of an elderly man in the hospital who seems to be slipping further and further away from reality. What I love about this short, other than the powerful emotional impression it makes in such a short amount of time, is that it somehow finds the unexpected beauty in the decline and confusion in our memories later in life. Unlike some gloomier submissions, it suggests that the natural process of mental deterioration can also be a dreamlike exploration of your life’s meaning.
Another, more critical but fascinating look at AI, can be seen in the Brazilian grounded sci-fi film Instructions For Crying. I guess AI therapy has already been in development so it’s not too much of a stretch that a middle-aged man experiencing a mental health crisis would choose an artificial-intelligence analyst. However, the writer-director-producer Matheus Parizi taps into some rich imaginative details of what this might look like in the future, including having to re-up your time by adding credit, and, just possibly, the AI assistant getting to know you well enough to gain some sort of sentience. The ending montage of this film is haunting and revealing, complementing some of the things we have heard the main character say in his sessions, and it is the perfect way to end Shorts Block No. 3.
Watch both Solace & Instructions For Crying in Shorts Block No. 3 of the virtual festival, live until November 3rd!
What to watch in the virtual festival: I wanted to highlight two films in the Shorts Block No. 1 that apparently had a little bug in them. These are both about dementia and both wonderful.
Before Al Arrives (yes I know most of us will probably read that as “Al” these days, but it’s actually “Al,” short for Alzheimer’s) is an abstract mood piece by the Italian director Simonetta Barbon. It’s another one of those short shorts that packs a surprisingly powerful punch in under five minutes. On a technical level it’s masterful in almost every way, from the sound design to the cinematography to the use of color and minimal props and set. It’s an experimental art film that may not specifically convey Alzheimer’s disease to every viewer, but it certainly conveys the emotions of anxiety, dread, and loss that go along with it.
When the Rain Falls in Baden Baden is a poetic short by Alessandro Soetje that, in a strange way, manages to express something beautiful about dementia and memory loss. It seems to be a sort of riff on the poetic art film Last Year At Marienbad, except it’s set in a nursing home during the COVID-19 pandemic. It explores some of the same topics of yearning for love and the fickle nature of memory. I don’t want to reveal what happens at the end because it’s a surprising tear-jerker. This one is also, on a technical filmmaking level, almost flawless. The black-and-white cinematography in particular is stunning.
I can be a little fussy about the order in the virtual festival and my original plan was to have Before Al Arrives, which is somewhat intense and disturbing, transition into When The Rain Falls in Baden-Baden, which ends on a more hopeful note. However, I realized that wasn’t happening, and instead it was stopping after Before Al Arrives, no matter what I did. What I eventually heard from Eventive was that “the last few milliseconds” of Before Al Arrives didn’t properly transcode, so it wasn’t transitioning into the last film, so I just ended up swapping the order. I’m sorry to leave you on that more melancholy note! Who knows, maybe it’s more real and less fantastical. I also wanted to make sure nobody missed When the Rain Falls in Baden Baden because of that glitch, though. These are both in their way incredibly artful and unique takes on dementia and its relation to mental health that deserve to be seen.
Check out the Mental Filmness virtual fest, which will run throughout the entire month of October! You’ll be hearing a lot more about this as we roll it out, with reviews, interviews, and more. It’s already live though, here’s the landing page to register for a free pass & watch the movies.
Pass it on! This is going to be a fantastic year for Mental Filmness, the Chicago-based film festival about mental health!
We are continuing to bring the “Chicago-based” part of the festival into focus, and this year is the first time every featured filmmaker is from Chicago or nearby. That means plenty of local filmmaker guests will be there to meet and discuss their work live and in person, making it a special, one-of-a-kind experience!
Noy only that, but we have a wide variety of films—just within our short film showcases we feature sci-fi, stop-motion animation, fictional-hybrid documentary, coming-of-age story and more.
And to top it all off, our feature film finale is a horror film, just in time for the season! The surreal horror-drama Compression, a dreamlike psychological film about grief and distorted reality, will close out the festival with director Jakob Bilinski as well as cast and crew members in attendance.
This year we will be screening in the beautiful historic Chicago Hope Academy chapel at 2189 W Bowler Street on the west side of Chicago and, as always, all of our programs are free and open to all.
Hope to see you at the movies about mental health!
The next festival season is coming—we need a few more good jury members/film screeners! Please apply if you are interested at all in helping screen and evaluate diverse submissions of films about mental health–comedies, documentaries, animation, genre films, and more!
No experience necessary—just a love of movies and mental health! You can also do this from anywhere in the world.
This is a passion project volunteer gig, but I will gladly give community service or academic credit hours if they are approved (and have), and letters of reference or recommendation. It’s a relatively fun and easy way to get a new experience on your resume—no minimum time commitment necessary, just whatever spare time you can devote to watching and rating movies, the majority of which are shorts 30 minutes or less.
We need volunteer jury help from now through the end of August.
A huge THANK YOU to everyone who came out through heavy rain and traffic to the Douglass Branch Library today to see local filmmaker Cortez Mack do his thing at our Community Healing Film Screening & Discussion. I always wish for a bit of a larger audience but actually the intimate group we had led to some meaningful discussion where I felt like every person in the room got to speak at some length and open up a bit personally, which was really special. Flourish Chicago provided some information about free memory assessments and Alzheimer’s Disease and contributed a lot of valuable information to the conversation. They also brought an abundance of goodies including organic fruit as at least a few people pointed out diet can be a huge contributor to dementia.
Cortez Mack’s short films are all publicly available on Youtube and he encourages people to seek out and share them there. He is clearly a filmmaker who is motivated by passion and the conversation surrounding his films. We have a bit of a history as he submitted his short film “Bobby” to Mental Filmness around 2020 and though we did not select it then, he reached out to me again. I’m so glad he did because there could have been any number of reasons why the jury did not select it that year, and I have circled back around to things before and love showcasing local filmmakers whenever possible.
I think it all panned out as it should in the end because the year he submitted was an all-virtual one and his films are really best seen in the context of the conversations surrounding them. One thing I said during our conversations is that I have developed a more expansive view of mental health over the years and I can now see how the three short films he screened fit together as a mental health showcase highlighting issues prevalent within the black community such as dementia, disconnection of the family, and father-son relationships. Cortez Mack thinks of the films as healing films, addressing topics that people don’t always talk about and providing a chance to open up and connect. I feel like our audience, even when small, always has amazing discussions and these were among the best I’ve seen.
Huge thanks again to Cortzez Mack, Flourish Chicago, the Douglass Branch of the Chicago Public Library for hosting, and the library’s African American Heritage Committee for sponsoring this special program.
On Saturday, June 1st, at 1:00 p.m. we will host the local filmmaker Cortez Mack at the Douglass Branch as he screens his three short films about mental health and healing in the black community.
Program: – “Bobby,” a short film about dementia and mental health awareness. – “Dinner Table,” a short film about the disconnection of the family. – “Splitting Image,” a short film about a father-son relationship.
The films will be followed by a discussion with Cortez Mack. Flourish Chicago, which provides free memory assessments and other community mental health services, will have an information table.
This program is proudly presented by the African American Heritage Committee of the Chicago Public Library and by Mental Filmness, a Chicago-based film festival about mental health.
It’s always nice when we do these screenings if we can have a mental health resource on hand to provide information and services. At our Community Healing Screening on 6/1 at the Douglass Branch Library we will be lucky enough to have Flourish Research present an information table. Roberto Navia will give a brief presentation on what Flourish Research does for the community and will have literature available for those interested. One of the services that Flourish Research provides is free memory assessments, which is a perfect tie-in for June being Alzheimer’s and Brain Awareness Month and the theme of Cortez Mack’s short film “Bobby,” which is about dementia and how one family copes with it. Some statistics state that dementia is an ailment that impacts the black community in a 2:1 ratio, and the film “Bobby” comments upon that phenomenon.
Learn more about Flourish Research:
Flourish Research Chicago is a research site studying Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and depression. We focus on educating the community on free health care and the access to innovative treatments volunteers receive by participating in research! We also offer free metabolic panels and memory assessments at our clinics.
On Thursday evening, May 9th, I and others were treated to the Pritzker Pucker Studio Lab 2024 Fellows’ Film Premiere. The Pritzker Pucker Studio Lab (PPSL) for the Promotion of Mental Health via Cinematic Arts is a sort of specialty film class that operates out of Northwestern University, where students create films with representations of mental illness or mental health that challenge stereotypes. As such I consider it to be a spiritual sister to the mission of Mental Filmness and I definitely felt that vibe at the screening I attended.
I believe PPSL was getting started around the same time as Mental Filmness was (in 2019, which it turned out wasn’t a great time to start something), and though they had many high-profile guests and some student works screened, this is the first completed showcase of films that was screened to the public to my knowledge. It packed out the theater in the Annie May Swift Hall at Northwestern.
These films were very accomplished shorts by any measure, let alone for students and first-time filmmakers. The short films explored their themes of mental health with a distinctive personal lens, respect and empathy, and nuance.
The program consisted of the following shorts:
Steering (dir. Luluh Abathra, 7 min.) – A simple yet evocative portrait of a grieving brother whose plans are interrupted by a wounded rat, causing him to turn his emotional journey inward and reflect. Director Luluh Abathra captured one of those slice-of-life pieces about experiencing a moment that was realistic and thought-provoking, and also got a chance to experiment with special effects.
Maladaptive (dir. Petra Popper-Freedman, 10 min.) – A short about maladaptive daydreaming disorder. Vivid daydreams continually distract a young woman from a first date to the point where she begins to isolate her potential partner—until she ends up pulling her date back in by beginning to actually describe the disorder and the daydreams. I loved that there was no easy solution to this situation, though, because after the confession the line between reality and daydream became even more blurred. This short did what my favorite films of this type do; it used humor to help the audience relate to the main character without undermining the seriousness of her condition. Director Petra Popper-Freedman did an impressive job playing the young woman with enough charm to make her situation sympathetic.
Growing Mad in the Midwest (dir. Elshadi Aberra, 11 min.) – This film about growing up in a large Ethiopian-American family in the Midwest, and feeling disconnected, featured skillful editing of a lot of home videos to depict familial relationships. The atmospheric footage captured what the filmmaker Elshadi Aberra called the “fragmentation of memory.” I feel like in a short period of time Aberra effectively created an impression that left you with a portrait of her childhood and how in some ways having a big family can give you a feeling of profound loneliness.
Ponytail (dir. Aisha Hamid, 19 mins.) – This quiet, subtle film about the connection between a Pakistani-American daughter and her father demonstrated a great amount of maturity and perception in letting its narrative patiently unfold. It truly felt like it was drawn from life and according to the director Aisha Hamid she used her personal experience to create it. It was one of those heartfelt stories that added more dimensions to the characters over the time they spent revealing themselves to each other, ultimately leading to some unexpected discoveries for both of them.
Quicksand (dir. Naya Hemphill, 15 min.) – This film felt similar in some ways to a short film called “Birdie” we screened last year, which also tackled the topic of maternal depression. It tells the story of a young mother and it begins by suggesting she is expected to be missing her kids while they spend a long weekend apart. Instead, the young woman struggles with her mental health in a different way, grappling with depression about her lost opportunities. The skillful acting and narrative devices that the director Naya Hemphill used in this film conveyed the mood quite effectively.
Manic Memoirs (dir. Francesca Gamba, 8.5 min.) – I’ve made no secret here and elsewhere that I have a special place in my heart for films about manic episodes since they speak to my own experience and diagnosis. The director and actress Francesca Gamba captures the insidious onset of mania quite well. One minute, you’re charming people with your fearlessness, impulsiveness, and impromptu singing. Next, you’re doing the same thing in a library study group and everyone’s staring back at you with a mixture of fear and concern. What happened in between? In a brief span of time this talented filmmaker shows the main character piecing together what happened and accepting responsibility for it. Francesca Gamba said in the Q & A later that she is a musician and her sense of sound helped depict the character’s struggle with mania. This is an experience close to her family.
Doh, God! (dir. Nathan Siskel, 6 min.) – The only animated film of the batch, Doh, God! might also have the honor of being the only short film to illustrate an existential crisis with the use of Play-Doh. In the film’s plot a child named Lily begins to feel a depression and listlessness that makes it difficult for her to get out of bed, and it escalates when she starts to question the meaning of the world around her. The creator Nathan Siskel skillfully employed the tactile use of Play-Doh to add some light silliness to the film (such as the bouncing snowman father figure) as well as to depict the heaviness of sadness, such when Lily has to shake off the parts of her bedding that stuck to her while she was asleep. Despite using something silly to convey something deep, this short leaves quite an impression (pun intended).
Avant-Garde (dir. Hank Yang, 16 min.) – Films about the therapeutic nature of art are also very near and dear to my heart. Avant-Garde is an observational narrative short about an obsessive technical perfectionist artist and his encounter with another artist who is more loose, messy, and abstract, but also surer of herself. The actors embrace their roles with expressions and postures that say it all with their diametrically opposed body language, one clenched and rigid, and the other laid-back and lackadaisical. Filmmaker Henry Yang is a visual artist and used some of his own art in the film, which he explained is partially about his own anxious perfectionism, adding another layer of realism.
The filmmakers gathered onto the stage for a Q & A after the screening and an audience member asked them what it was like having these films, which were so deeply personal and based on a theme about mental health, screened for an audience for the first time. It was a vulnerable and brave move for all of these students, and they were all so open and insightful when responding to questions and explaining their films. It was also clear that not only did this experience enrich them and guide them through the process of making a finished film, but the students had bonded with each other by helping out on each others’ films. The new director of Pritzker Pucker Studio Lab, Ines Sommer, is an associate professor in film and television at Northwestern University with a background in documentary filmmaking who has also been heavily involved in supporting and advocating for Midwestern filmmakers. She seems to have done a stellar job in taking on the leadership of this film program. This screening event was well-organized, well-attended, and most importantly, it created a feeling of community surrounding cinema and mental health. I plan to keep an eye on the Pritzker Pucker Studio Lab and perhaps find a way to collaborate in the future.
The Chicago Critics Film Festival happened this week, and though I only made it on Saturday I caught what was most important to me: the new don hertzfeldt short, Me.
There was a short documentary in the festival last year, A Beautiful Purpose, about a bipolar disorder support group where someone asked the question “Do you miss being able to *feel* music?” I knew exactly what they meant. I think the Hertzfeldt short film World Of Tomorrow was one of those beautiful things I connected to during mania that will always have heightened emotions involved for me. It moved me deeply when I saw it on the big screen at Fantastic Fest (where, others pointed out to me later, I was manic) and I re-watched it countless times at home, and sent it to everyone I knew, insisting that they watch this beautiful thing that would change their lives forever. It was one of those things for me that I originally perceived with total sensory overload, to the point where even today when I watch it I can still *feel* those lights, colors, and voices, and the music, with a sort of extra, missing sense. Which I guess vibes with the movie perfectly. Here’s the thing—I still think World Of Tomorrow, watching it today, is an almost objectively perfect short film (many agree), and to borrow a line from the film, though I was mad at the time, I loved it as though we were both originals.
I was highly anticipating the new Hertzfeldt short at Fantastic Fest 2015 while ascending into my episode based upon how much I’d loved his It’s Such A Beautiful Day trilogy of short films, which I watched at the Music Box with Don present right around the time of my divorce, which also felt other-worldly. While that trilogy, about a man named Bill who suffers a mysterious illness that causes him to reflect on his life while he is mentally and physically deteriorating, is profoundly depressing, I find the premise of the World of Tomorrow trilogy infinitely (pun intended) more depressing. In this trilogy of sci-fi animated shorts, Hertzfeldt presents the idea that not only is joy in life fleeting and its memory painful, but that in the future, people will attempt to, for some reason, prolong this experience forever. Our future clones, designed to preserve our lifespan, will suffer many signs of mental deterioration—and they will ultimately spend most of their lives drilling down to some emotional core memory that they have never experienced, yet long to feel. At least Bill was once really alive!
Yes, Hertzfeldt made a trilogy out of World Of Tomorrow, too. The other two entries in the series can’t and don’t match the brilliance of the original (many agree), and how could they? I wouldn’t want them to, or if they did, I’d probably be watching them in an infinite loop forever. The other two episodes are still painfully funny and emotive in moments and I would still recommend watching them if you’d like to see the story arc, as it is, reach its depressing yet satisfying logical conclusion. I’ll never pretend to have an analytical enough mind to keep track of all the numbered clones and what exactly the final plot point is, but I got the emotional gist of it. The clone of David in the end is giving up all of his memories—including basic motor skills like walking—in a journey to discover the one memory a clone of Emily left him years and years ago. All the pop-up-ads and promises of his future brain, and even his basic health, were not enough to overcome some nagging feeling that he once loved someone and felt something that was original.
Which brings me to, Me! Me is Hertzfeldt’s most nihilistic and disturbing film yet. It’s difficult to describe, and I don’t want to spoil it—spoiling a Hertzfeldt film basically lies in spoiling the imagery, and there is one particularly disturbing image that he holds on the screen for quite awhile, dangling it before you while haunting music plays. Gone from this film are the humor and glimmers of hope. I’m sure the whole film is not meant to be analytically interpreted, but the main thrust I got from it was that it was taking Don’s nihilism even further, in that within humanity lies its own seeds of destruction, and despite some potential (some perhaps beautiful potential, that last image and music seem to hint) it is almost destined to do the wrong things and drive itself into extinction. There’s not really any characters here, there’s archetypes; not so much a plot as destructive cycles. It was brutally depressing in a lot of ways and I felt like the only redeeming image was the disturbing one in the end, which seemed to say life can sometimes be beautiful and we waste it, in a way. Which I guess is what most of his movies say.
I love how much Hertzfeldt has always surprised me. I used to think I didn’t like short films (cue irony now that I’m working on a film festival that mostly screens shorts films that continue to amaze me). I wasn’t ever a huge fan of animation—but Hertzfeldt has always bowled me over in how much emotion he can evoke from making one simple line move (particularly in the eyes). I never think myself a fan of classical music, but he always makes me realize the epic, lively beauty it has. As someone who sometimes still watches his shorts on repeat when I feel emotional and am trying to understand the world, Hertzfeldt hits just the right note—he doesn’t shy away from the general painful banality of life, but he reminds you there’s still some hope and humor there. Me is not something I’ll likely add to this re-watch repertoire, but I’m glad he took his nihilism to a logical conclusion, with such an effective result.
