Mental Filmness

Statistically, up to 25 percent of all pregnancies end in a miscarriage. So why do people so rarely talk about it? Cartoonist Chari Pere received a huge response to a comic she wrote about the trauma of her own miscarriage from both women and men about how relieved they were to find someone speaking up about how common it is, how it’s not your fault, and how it’s okay to let out your grief and ask for help. Eventually, with the assistance of the 2024 Jewish Writers’ Initiative Digital Storytellers Lab, she adapted the comic into an animated short film as part of a series called “Unspoken Cartoonmentary” that aims to tackle stigmatized and difficult societal topics with the goal of giving them a voice and an audience.

Here Chari addresses why it’s difficult to talk about a miscarriage, the role of men in sharing the trauma, and why it is an especially important topic for the Jewish community. Chari believes a miscarriage can have an even larger impact on your mental health than your physical health, so it’s important to open up the conversation about them.

You can still watch Miscarried for FREE in the virtual festival through 11/3: https://watch.eventive.org/mentalfilmness2024/play/6704b2b8dd02d60047462b6c/66f4621dfc390800dcddfe68

Tell us what YOU think here: https://www.mentalfilmness.com/forums

It’s funny, at this point Mental Filmness has a bit of a history with both filmmaker and jury member Beatrice Wong and Catalina Kulczar, the filmmaker behind the biographical documentary short Daisy. Beatrice and I both saw Daisy last year and thought it was fantastic, and since Beatrice was a champion from the very start she really jumped at the chance to interview Catalina. Daisy is also a film about history, in a way—understanding your past, intergenerational trauma, and your identity and home.

This was one of the most poignant interviews of the festival to me because it made me tear up a little bit when Beatrice was talking about the meaning of a home. I like what Catalina says about home being more than just a place, but where you feel you belong. Her film weaves together the storylines of the life her family built for themselves after surviving Nazism (and turning away from Judaism to survive) and the Hungarian Revolution in Budapest, and how she copes with intergenerational trauma through open-water swimming. She narrates the film in Spanish, Hungarian, and English. With all the disparate parts of her identity Catalina still manages to find places to call home, like the cold-swimming water group she joined during the pandemic that opens this film. Like many of my favorite documentaries, it shifts focus based on a pivotal unexpected event, but there isn’t a part of it that I feel doesn’t touch profoundly upon the topic of mental health.

Listen to this insightful and moving interview, and watch Daisy during its closing weekend for FREE in the virtual festival through 11/3:

https://watch.eventive.org/mentalfilmness2024/play/66f084de37280200a77ffdfc/66f0915078d1e2003aadad64

Tell us what you think here: https://www.mentalfilmness.com/forums

I’m not sure how easy the dramatic short film A Silent Scream is to watch, but it’s both rare and refreshing to see so much footage of a Latino man sobbing, suffering from heartache, and calling for help. Men’s mental health is already an overlooked topic, and in a culture known for its machismo this sort of vulnerability feels especially brave.

There was a time after my own divorce where I was like the character Oliver in the film: suicidally depressed, and constantly crying and compulsively calling people. I kept calling any friends or family that were available, just trying to get someone on the line I could talk to for a few minutes to keep me going. Just like Oliver says about the phone call with his mother, it wasn’t even about what they actually said to me most of the time, it was about the comfort of hearing their voice.

Some of the things the people in this film say to Oliver are also shockingly close to things people said to me during that time, and I thought the male lead Silvestre Soto did an excellent job sustaining the melancholy for the film’s runtime without it ever feeling too melodramatic or over-the-top. It’s a powerful performance that packs a sucker punch within the context of writer-director Oliver Granillo’s grittily realistic script and poetic voice-overs. There is a scene involving a phone call to Oliver’s brother that provides a brief burst of hope before snapping back to reality where sadness is still omnipresent that feels so true and films seldom depict this. Maybe it’s a downer for some, but for those who have struggled with the same dark thoughts and feelings, and especially men who aren’t supposed to cry, it could potentially be very validating, and that is one of the major goals of this festival.

You can still catch A Silent Scream in the virtual festival for FREE through 11/3: https://watch.eventive.org/mentalfilmness2024/play/67020e1b7520fd00560960a7/66f084c118331a0048c6bb2d

Tell us what YOU think here: https://www.mentalfilmness.com/forums

It seemed like a trick—Alex Nimrod of 4085 Productions, the young writer-producer-star of All Alone Together, contacted me on Halloween saying he was available for an interview that evening. It ended up being a treat, however, to talk about this surreal horror film with a layer of mental health awareness. Alex, so animated and personable, looks so strikingly different from the constantly troubled character he plays in his own film that he’s almost unrecognizable. He’s found success with his young filmmaking collective and is now working for Blumhouse Productions. He’s a shining example of what happens when you confront your fears head-on.

You can still catch All Alone Together in the virtual festival for FREE through 11/3!

https://watch.eventive.org/mentalfilmness2024/play/67021027a7ee110082cf2d9b

Tell us what you think here: https://www.mentalfilmness.com/forums

Here is a perfect example of why I am thrilled to have more diverse interviewers this year. Beatrice Wong is able to speak to German-Iranian writer-director Teymour Tehrani about his experimental art film Disconnect within a context I don’t have: that of the parental pressure of an Asian background and the gender dysmorphia of a transgender individual.

I love this interview because I can tell that while Tehrani is happy if people just appreciate the sound and visuals in Disconnect, which are quite appealing on their own, he is also very happy that some people like the perceptive Beatrice Wong of Mental Filmness, as well as some of our audience members, read deeper meaning about identity and self-acceptance into it. If you were intrigued by this abstract short and its meaning, and even if you were not, it is well worth listening to this conversation between Beatrice and Teymour Tehrani, as well as Matthias Hornschuh and Nami Strack, who worked on the innovative music and sound design.

You can still watch Disconnect for FREE in the virtual festival through 11/3:

https://watch.eventive.org/mentalfilmness2024/play/67020c7b64a67e00480d87a3/66f08c38ed61ff00b68474d8

Tell us what you think here: https://www.mentalfilmness.com/forums

“Art keeps me alive,” a psychiatric resident tells an artist from the Kiribil company after one of their in-house workshops. Art therapy is a healing process, and there’s a reason why it’s so widely used with those living with chronic mental health conditions. As an artist myself, I understand that the process helps drive anxiety from your brain while you focus on each brushstroke and channel parts of yourself that are beyond other forms of communication.

The French documentary feature film Flowers On Their Path, directed by Pascale Labout, is a labor of love in many ways. It tells the story of an alliance of artists, the Kiribil company, whose mission is to bring art programs to those who are the most disadvantaged and the furthest away from these cultural offerings. Both Kiribil and Pascale forged ahead through the pandemic to complete this heartfelt project.

I appreciated that while Flowers On Their Path followed a linear evolution of the effect of art on the psychiatric patients in the film, it didn’t attempt to create neat storylines or a cast of characters. This film is more like a loose collection of vignettes of the art collective members interacting with the patients, whom they seem to be very fond of. It was fully immersive both in the projects filmed and in the conversations with the participants involved, with very little judgment or framing, just letting everything be. I think the scene spent waiting for a reaction to the body-music prompt was key, it’s both patient and revealing.

Watch Flowers On Their Path for FREE through 11/3! https://watch.eventive.org/mentalfilmness2024/play/67020fa392ee0b00745fdfcd

Tell us what YOU think at https://www.mentalfilmness.com/forums

That’s right, Mental Filmness screened its first AI-generated film, Solace, in the virtual festival this year. Clocking in at under three minutes, Solace makes a compelling use of AI as a tool for exploring the surreal and dreamlike memories of an older man struggling with dementia as his relatives view these images in a futuristic hospital, trying to call him back.

The inimitable jury member and Mental Filmness supporter and spirit extraordinaire Beatrice Wong gets a thoughtful interview out of Solace director Arthur Machado, asking some of the very same questions I had about the consistency of the AI generation and how much was plotted out in the script vs. the imagery. (I also had no idea those were AI voices in the film). Don’t get too scared, though, folks—even Arthur Machado admits he doesn’t think AI is going to replace human creators, it’s merely another tool they can use for expression. I think Beatrice also summed up the feelings of our jury this year—-this was finally AI done right, in service of a meaningful story that benefits from its fantastic imagery.

You can still watch Solace for FREE in the virtual festival through 11/3: https://watch.eventive.org/mentalfilmness2024/play/67020c7b64a67e00480d87a3/66f0906852ae2f003357fc0e

Tell us what you think here: https://www.mentalfilmness.com/forums

Here’s another Mental Filmness jury member interviewer who did a fantastic job. Danielle Gibson is a filmmaker herself and brings that perspective to her conversation with Matheus Parizi, writer-director of the Brazilian science-fiction short film Instructions For Crying. Just barely science fiction, the film explores what AI therapy might look like in the future amidst a world of natural and personal disasters. I’ll let these two describe it in more detail in this amazing cerebral cinephile meeting of the minds!

You can still catch Instructions For Crying for FREE in the virtual festival through 11/3:

https://watch.eventive.org/mentalfilmness2024/play/67020c7b64a67e00480d87a3/66f310b9a89cea08473e18d2

If you’re looking for a mental health & horror movie this season—you might enjoy All Alone Together. I’ll openly admit, this movie seemed *totally awesome* to me, partly because, probably, I thought it would have been “totally awesome” for me to watch as a twenties-something college student. And, in full disclosure, this feature film seems to have been made by twenty-something college students, so it’s pretty much the Platonic ideal of that.

That being said, what this film lacks in terms of any technical proficiency, it makes up for in spades with imagination. I still feel like among six years of Mental Filmness entries, the first 15 minutes of this film stand out as being particularly magical. Not only because it’s one of those filmmaker’s illusions or “tricks,” but because it also succinctly lays out the roadmap for the rest of the film. It’s a pretty layered script. We learn everything we need to know about the character in the beginning, and the rest of the movie is just exploring those demons—alcoholism, the death of the character’s parents (and dog), the filmmaker’s culpability in it all, and the pressure of changing. What is “the haunting” to you?

The ending of this film might seem like another bookend to the whole “trick,” but to me, it felt appropriate. I loved that this film was nuanced and confident enough to work within its own weird logic without ever fully explaining anything. It creates its own fantastical reality where a student short has Hollywood-like moguls clamoring after it, and the filmmaker moonlights as a night janitor at an elementary school having 2 a.m. conversations with a kid who had an after-school club that ran for 6 hours. What does all of this represent? His desire to capitalize on own tragedy, his pressure on himself to write himself out of it, or his overall desire to change the outcome? The film leaves you questioning all of those things and, if you’re the right audience, surrendering yourself to its spell, and that’s what I loved about it.

Watch All Alone Together in the virtual festival for FREE until 11/3: https://watch.eventive.org/…/play/67021027a7ee110082cf2d9b

Tell us what you think here: https://mentalfilmness.com/forums/forum/all-alone-together/

One of my favorite things about curating this festival is seeing different takes on mental health from all around the world. One such example is this interview, where the indispensable Beatrice Wong from Hong Kong, former filmmaker in the fest and now one of its most dedicated assistants, interviews Piotr Gabler from Poland, who made this year’s The Colour of Silence. The Colour of Silence is an artful and poetic quasi-documentary short about experiencing depression and isolation in the midst of the pandemic, and slowly finding the colour in your life again.

I would just like to give a special note of appreciation for the help I have had with the interviews this year—it has been fantastic to have more diverse perspectives. I was especially touched that both Jim and Beatrice made and used a Mental Filmness virtual background—something I never even would have thought to mention!