Time for the last interview of the virtual festival! Our inimitable jury member and fellow L.A. filmmaker Danielle Gibson was the perfect interviewer for Regina Oliver, writer-director-producer-star and general powerhouse behind the short film Always Enough. And though our virtual festival has wrapped, it is clear that the creative team behind Always Enough really wants it to be seen far and wide and that there will be more opportunities to do so, so please keep an eye on its future at ttps://www.instagram.com/alwaysenoughfilm.
The visually compelling and inspirational Always Enough uses surreal visual imagery that I agree is reminiscent of David Lynch, though that makes sense if it originally came from a dream. Though experimental, the film conveys a message of self-acceptance quite clearly. It reminds me of something a therapist used to tell me about some of my most regrettable and shameful actions: “Maybe you were doing the best you could at the time.” Maybe doing the best we can at the time and under the circumstances, including during the times that we struggle with our self-worth and other mental health challenges, is always enough.
This Is A Sad Story appeared in the festival a little later and so does our interview, but you should seek this film out any way you can if you didn’t catch it. It stands out as a truly unique Mental Fillmness entry in that it explores sadness in a more absurdist existentialist way, and it crackles with the energetic wit and creativity of youth in the way that only a youth-made film can. I will be keeping an eye on emerging filmmaker Nuno Abreu to see what he does next, because he definitely has a knack for snappily written dialogue and dry humor without sacrificing the warmth of a sunset or peer support.
Mental Filmness jury gem Beatrice Wong has also become a stellar interviewer. I love her use of split screen, fades, and the dreamy music by Yuhang which gives it all a meditative tone. She also uses a skill I sometimes lack: she is succinct! At a tight eleven minutes, I’ll bet you have time to watch this charming conversation about youth and representing the nature of sadness in a fresh way—and you certainly should.
This coming week, November 16-22, is Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week in Chicago. You can find events near you at hhweek.org for fundraising for anti-poverty organizations, collecting food and toiletries, and more.
Mental Filmness will be partnering once again with the Chicago Public Library’s Disability Pride Committee to host a screening of the film 5000 Blankets, with producer Douglas Shaffer in person. The screening will take place at the Albany Park branch of the Chicago Public Library on November 22nd at 2 p.m., and will feature an optional blanket drive (last time I said this, and we still received a *ton* of blankets to give to organizations that work with the homeless! Chicago is very generous). Based on the true story of a man who had a mental breakdown and went missing in the streets, and the family that went to search for him, this film explores the intersection of mental health and homelessness.
Please join us on November 22nd for our very special final event of the year.
Although the virtual festival has wrapped up, it’s still well worth watching this brief 14-minute conversation between Beatrice Wong and Niels Fiegerslev. Even if you didn’t catch the short film Forever Dying in the festival, this interview touches upon the importance of the mental health implications of health anixety. This is a topic, as Beatrice and Niels point out, that has only grown more relevant since post-COVID and that is probably relatable to many people to varying degrees of severity. Forever Dying—featuring a man panicking in a doctor’s waiting room about a cartoonishly grotesque boil growing out of his neck–shows how one’s anxiety can color reality, and how physical symptoms are often tied to our mental health. If you want to treat the manifestation, as the doctor in the film says, you must first treat the underlying condition, no matter what form that might take.
We still have a few more wonderful interviews rolling in from the festival this week, but now is the moment everyone has been waiting for—the results of the awards for the 2025 FINAL Mental Filmness virtual festival!
Yes, awards are kind of silly, and I hope no one takes them *too* seriously. Everyone should be very proud they were selected, as we had a large amount of quality entries and an incredible array of judges.
Once again, awards are decided by tallying the votes viewers cast on their virtual ballots (which Eventive does automatically), and then taking the top scorers and giving them an award based on the film that was the most empathetic, the most realistic, or the most stigma-breaking film. (This seems a little arbitrary as well but somehow it always seems to work out).
I am proud to say that out of a couple hundred virtual ballots cast, these are the results:
The Next Step (dir. Nora Guicheney) is a fairly straightforward documentary, but it obviously struck a chord with many audience members as it was one of the most highly rated films of the 2025 virtual festival. I chalk this up partly to the film’s unique and overlooked subject matter, that of the decision to wean off medication and become pregnant when living with bipolar disorder. The other part is undoubtedly the nakedly honest, brave, and personal story and narration by director Nora Guicheney. Nora leaves in the hard parts, including arguments with her mother and partner about her choice to conceive and her memories of psychosis, while still allowing room for the quiet, gentle parts of exploring her familial identity through letters, photos, and reflections. The end result is a brief but ponderous film that reveals Nora’s next step. For its candor as well as its integration of natural conversations, we’d like to honor The Next Step with the Realism Award for showing a difficult decision for one living with a mental illness with unflinching realness.
I had a feeling Stay (dir. Nick Ceulemans) would resonate with the audience as well as it did with our jury. The story of a woman with an ambiguous mental illness and the partner who becomes her caretaker, this film hits upon our universal need to want to be loved even when we are at our most unlovable. Having been the mentally ill person in such a relationship, I related to and did a lot of the things the character in this film did, including lying, abusing medication, and other self-destructive acts, yet my partner at the time somehow loved and tolerated me anyway, and we even had warm and funny moments, so I can vouch for the accuracy of this portrayal. And spoiler alert, that ending is a real tearjerker. Due to its portrait of someone living with a mental illness who is flawed but still in a loving relationship, and its interesting exploration of how far that love can be pushed to its limits, Stay is awarded the Empathy Award for investing the audience’s feelings in the future of both of these characters and their relationship in a surprisingly scant running time.
Finally, I believe Common Law (dir. Kagah Goh) firmly belongs in the Stigma Breaker category. A film about a rarely mentioned or discussed, yet immensely important, topic, Common Law tackles the difficulty and red tape surrounding getting disability benefits when you live with a chronic mental illness, and are receiving some support from a partner or family members. Based on the true story of what happened to writer-director Kagan Goh, Common Law also tackles stigma against speaking openly about mental illness in Canadian-Asian families and culture. Kagan certainly walks the walk in real lifee as the “bipolar laureate” of Vancouver, helping spread mental health awareness and support and highlighting the artistic achievements of those who live with mental illness. It’s incredible how far Kagan has come as a filmmaker since we first screened his short film The Day My Cat Saved My Life, about a man in the midst of a psychotic break who is grounded and brought back to Earth by the touch of his cat. Common Law is a brave, personal, and incredibly realistic and nuanced film about some of the very specific challenges of living with manic depression.
Thank you to all the amazing submissions we received, I’m always a bit blown away by the variety and the diversity. Thank you for being a part of the special final *virtual* festival (the live one will continue, so stay tuned).
I promise this is what I intend to be the final post about the festival finale, and I will stop spamming your feed/inbox if you follow Mental Filmness in any subscription-type capacity.
Tomorrow I will announce voting results, so get all your votes in for the virtual festival and check back for that. Tomorrow I will probably say this again and elaborate on it a bit more, but this is the last year I intend to host a *virtual* festival. It was born out of necessity during the pandemic, and it has always been a bit of a logistical challenge to balance it with physical events once we started bringing those back. More than anything else I’ve just realized these kinds of films work much better with a conversation live in a room, and anything I’ve tried to replicate that in the virtual festival just hasn’t worked as well. What that means is hopefully more *live* screenings in the future.
Finally, I think we have touched upon all the films in the festival in some way except for one that I saved for last, which is Technical Fault. Technical Fault is a really incredible experimental short about a very important topic, the intersection between homelessness and mental health. Following the narration of an artist experiencing homelessness and borderline personality order, the film moves between animation and reality, between everyday life and memory in his work. The reflexive, poetic perspective opens up impressive insights into the realities of homeless and mentally ill people – and thus makes an important contribution to social understanding. It’s much better seen than described, so you should watch it in the next few hours here: Technical Fault | Shorts Block No. 1 | Mental Filmness 2025 Virtual Festival
The reason why I touched upon this topic is it dovetails with another *live* program in Chicago that will be happening November 22nd. We are once again partnering with the Disability Pride Committee of the Chicago Public Library to host a screening of Doug Shaffer’s 5000 Blankets, which is about the very relevant and timely topic of homelessness and mental health, during the season where it is most needed. See attached flyer below. Please attend if you can!
And enjoy the *final* final eve of the Mental Filmness virtual festival! Thank you for all your support!
Remember, this is the LAST night to watch films from the Mental Filmness virtual festival, and I am just going to highlight a couple more *short* films that you definitely have time to watch before it closes. And remember to get in those votes! We will definitely tally them up and post results.
As someone recently searching for medical care, I have heard the phrase “health anxiety” bandied around a lot. Hypochondria, fear of finding something medically wrong with you, or fear of death are all so common now as to have their own terminology. What Niels Fiegerslev’s Forever Dying touches upon so well is how physical and mental health tie together. Sometimes we almost *want* something to be wrong with us physically, so it can explain some more deep-rooted psychological problems.
Forever Dying has elements of dark comedy in its main subject becoming increasingly anxious in a sterile waiting room to see a doctor, while a mysterious boil grows on him. In the clever way it ties physical and mental health together, this character’s anxiety presents as nothing to be overly concerned about to the other patients and the doctor. My favorite part of this metaphor comes in the end though, where I feel the film delivers its ultimate message from the doctor: if you don’t treat the underlying condition itself, the outward manifestation of it won’t go away.
There’s a mere matter of hours to watch what you can in the virtual festival and vote vote vote! And at the end, there will be a Chicago announcement! I am going to highlight a couple more short films that you definitely have time to check out before the final votes are in!
I feel badly it’s taken so long to get around to highlighting Alway Enough, because the creative team behind it (Regina Oliver & Keegan Jones) is so obviously passionate about their film, this festival, and mental health. It sounds like it is picking up some steam in the festival circuit so you will probably still have chances to see it, but you can see it here for FREE right now!
Always Enough is a highly dreamlike and symbolic film about mental health, generational trauma, and quiet resilience. I feel like it strikes a very good balance between being a more experimental art film with its use of bare-bone visuals to convey its message, with enough of its story being delivered in a haunting voice-over monologue to appeal to the more narrative-oriented viewer. Still, there’s enough left to interpretation in the imagery of a flickering television, a mirror, and the bandaged wounds of past trauma to carry its tone-poem about self-image and self-acceptance on a parallel track to the delivered words. With the many more surreal, experimental art films we received this year, I feel like this is one that has some of the broadest audience appeal.
Hello! Today is the last day to watch the Mental Filmness 2025 virtual festival, through 10 p.m. Central time this evening 11/2. There are so many gems and there may even be a couple more interviews and reviews coming, so watch what you can and remember to vote on your favorites before it closes out (we will announce winners). Plus, we will have an announcement for another Chicago event very soon!
First, I’d like to highlight the graceful and tragic, yet uplifting Romanian short film Ofem, directed by Ciprian Ioan Iacob. A parent’s loss of a child is a painful and raw topic. This brave film, with its nearly flawless cinematography and visuals, committed performances, and realistic scenes of therapy and processing grief, rises to the challenge of tackling this subject matter in a sensitive and even beautiful way.
Especially the first part of Ofem can be difficult to watch because of the immersive experience of the mother’s grief, but I encourage the audience to stick with it to the therapeutic breakthroughs, which feel just as powerful. There is also an ending monologue about what makes a great mother, wherein the character accepts what happened to her, that made me cry while also making me feel I should be accepting of the flaws within myself. It’s a little deeper and darker but incredibly rewarding, so for a film that will truly move you I highly recommend Ofem.
As the virtual festival winds down, I thought I’d highlight a quiet, sweet film that I think is one of the more feel-good entries. The focus of Morten Hansen’s Dolldays is men’s mental health, and its setting in a small and slow village in Norway is a part of that story. Everybody knows everybody else, which makes it difficult to openly discuss their feelings. As what seems like an absurd preventative measure, a ventriloquist teaches men in the village how to use puppets to express the emotions that are difficult for the men to speak aloud. Surprisingly, this form of puppet therapy actually works and encourages honest conversations between the men in the program.
Two central characters in the film are a father and his son, who has expressed disappointment for a long time that they can’t speak about their mother’s death. Dolldays shows how important it is not to sweep these uncomfortable conversations under the rug, and to literally face our feelings. There is one scene I love that is representative of the whole film in a way, where two men are fishing and talking to each other while their puppets lie behind them. The dolls may have been useful initially to as a way to voice suppressed thoughts, but they soon carry over into having a very real impact on the lives of the patients. We’ve probably all seen or heard of therapists using dolls or puppets with kids as an outlet for what they find hard to say, but there’s something tender and heartwarming about seeing it work for grown men.
