I should mention that while Mental Filmness is a festival whose lifeblood is short films, we actually do have a few feature films playing in the virtual fest, and they are all pretty special. One is Look At Me, a brave film in many ways. It is written, directed, and starring Taylor Olson, and adapted from his stage play “Heavy.” I can confirm what Taylor Olson says in his interview, we do not receive many films about eating disorders from a male perspective, so it was refreshing to see one, especially one that made so many bold and interesting artistic choices.
I will let Taylor discuss the film in his own words in his Mental Filmness interview with Jim Laczkowski, Chicago film critic and creator of the Director’s Club podcast. I knew Jim would be the perfect person to interview Taylor as he is passionate about mental health, body image, and filmmaking, and he is currently making his own hybrid “fictionalized biography” himself. Enjoy!
The short film Once Again shows a story that is little told despite its commonality—that of being the live-in caregiver for your mentally declining parent, and how it can impact your own mental health. The daily interruptions, the frustrations, and the phenomenon of having to sometimes just “go with it.” This drama captures that particular slice of life with warmth and accuracy. The Puerto Rican writer-director Coraly Santaliz has a sensitive touch for quiet realism, and lets the adult daughter character in this story experience anger at the repetitive actions that signal her mother’s mental deterioration, and distractions and mistakes at work, but still, at the end of the day, lets her laugh at the absurdity of it all.
Both of the actresses here express emotion in a way that feels genuine, the daughter being so frazzled and her mother with Alzheimer’s disease so seemingly innocent and well-meaning that it’s hard to reconcile with the fact that her behavior is actually quite annoying. Still, a couple of the major tenets of working with Alzheimer’s form the heart at this film’s core: that of being able to find some humor in it, and that of being able to just go along for the ride sometimes.
Reya’s World is dark. It’s blue and fuzzy and crackly, with piles of dishes and flickering screens and small moments of hope—followed by the fear that you’ll lose motivation again. This film has the look, sound, and feel of cyclical major depression, and the way an audience will react to it depends on their reaction to that.
However, I will let the young director Isabella Montana speak about this film in her own words with Mental Filmness’s assistant extraordinaire Beatrice Wong, in an appropriately analog written interview:
“I had a Zoom interview with the director Izzy Montana where we talked about her film Reya’s World, which is a pretty subversive DIY short film about a girl, Reya, stuck inside her bedroom while struggling during a cycle of depression. With unconventional shot selections (there are only a handful of wide shots), and sound design choices (more on that later) Izzy is able to conjure up an atmospheric trip that started with a bleak canvass of greyish desaturated colours that reflected how Reya perceived her current life.
The colours gradually came back slightly when unplanned happenstances come across her, e.g. a friend swings by to hang out and instead of giving her a list of advice, just chose to be present and had random banter or just fuss about with art supplies (which is a scene ripped from real life experiences of her or her peers). When I asked Izzy what her background was, I was expecting film school, being a crew member of a small production company, etc. but instead Izzy’s film education is more on the academic side of things like film theory and analysis. And that even though she was also the cinematographer, editor, did the colour grading as well, all this technical stuff wasn’t part of her studies and she was learning them herself on the fly.
This is a pretty impressive feat and not something that she wanted to repeat but at the time of filming, she was too shy to reach out for help, or her circle of friends didn’t intersect with film school training and one funny tidbit was the boom operator doesn’t know what a boom is when he offered to help. So my next question naturally became, where did she find the drive to undertake this endeavour, was it a therapeutic thing that she had to do to help herself – Well it started life as a thesis project, and since depression was something she experienced and currently something one of her close friends was struggling with, it was the go-to theme for the script, and it was the scriptwriting process that was the most therapeutic part for her, because she was basically shooting the film in her bedroom, planning the shoots for the next day before bed then catching some Zzzzs whilst having all the film equipment next to her bed. She was forced to compartmentalize and get emotionally detached from the script, and it was during the post production process that she was able to find some sort of catharsis.
Pretty par for the course in DIY filmmaking about personal topics. As for the script, one may say that it doesn’t adhere to the 3-Act structure rule and grade it D minus, but that is of Izzy’s design, as she is very aware that mental health isn’t exactly a movie – a problem arises, then the protagonist fight their way through the problem, the problem gets resolved – so for this film, she chose to give the film something akin to a cliffhanger ending, it hints at Reya seeming to look forward to a less bleak tomorrow, but at the same time also doesn’t hint at she is able to be motivated enough to leave her safe space, her bedroom. There is no obvious resolution, which I thought is a great choice when making a film about mental health.
We also spoke at length about the audio choices, while all other filmmakers strive to put maximum effort in getting the cleanest sounding dialogues and sound environments, or laboriously fine tuning noise reduction settings, Izzy chose to think differently, because she wants to invite the audience to also experience what Reya hears – the world is blanketed out by a mix of hissing, white noise, a droning tone that won’t go away, sincere words of advice from a friend that sounds like it’s coming from deep underwater, the only thing of interest to her is when someone recognizes her and calls out her name, and the only moment where the audio briefly becomes “normal” sounding. Izzy wants to let the audience hear through Reya’s ears, when they are already seeing through her eyes.
Izzy is humble and kept mentioning she felt it was underlit, or improperly colour corrected, but for me it is what makes the film work so well, I felt there is a lived-in quality about the film, and hearing about Izzy actually living inside her set, being self-taught and shooting the film intuitively rather than according to conventions laid down by a committee of tutors, I understand why. Though this is only her second short film ever, she really managed to wrangle a very balanced performance from her young actors – naturalistic, laid-back but engaging, and a way she achieved this is by allowing the actors to express the gist of the lines written in the script rather than reciting it word-by-word. Izzy didn’t aim to transmit a carefully constructed message, but rather wanted to create an intimate journey that resonates with audiences who have or are going through similar mental health struggles and maybe inspire them to look back at their experiences under a different light.
My last question to her was why the 4:3 aspect ratio when most films or cameras are by default 16:9 now, and the answer is simpler than one might think, this is just because of how the bedroom was like, a 4:3 rectangle of space, and Izzy also found this aspect ratio is better at conveying how claustrophobic Reya felt about the world she is in, and it certainly works better this way than resorting to the default of 16:9, and hence the conscious choice not to film wide shots. To be honest I was a little blown away by the responses, and Izzy sounded more like a veteran filmmaker rather than someone who is just doing coursework, there’s a lot of detail in the creative processes that are well thought out and leaving very little to chance. Wishing a bright future for her.”
At this point Mental Filmness has been going long enough that I feel like there’s a sort of “template” to some of the films I see over and over again, a conventional story arc to a mental health film, if there even is such a thing. One of them is “Character A wants to kill themselves. They call a hotline, or otherwise take a step toward their plan, but it goes wrong. They randomly happen upon the benevolent Character B, a wise, therapeutic, and redeeming figure who changes their mind.”
I don’t know how many films I have seen that follow that particular plot line at this point, and Hotline sort of follows it, too. We all know, though, that a movie is made out of much more than plot, otherwise we would have run out of movies long ago. Hotline takes a humorous approach to this topic, which is rarer, and it pokes fun at the bureaucratic red tape that creates a barrier in suicide hotlines, and by extension to receiving mental health care in general. Hotline also discusses imposter syndrome and the pressure of success and the resultant anxiety among overachieving college students, which is becoming a much more widely acknowledged social phenomenon.
What I loved the most about this film is that it was made by Julia Veith, a junior at Stanford University, partly to address underfunded mental health resources on college campuses. I know there are some who might actually disagree with me, but I think it is important to show that mental health does not necessarily discriminate by social or economic class. I’ve also always like to shine a spotlight on young filmmakers who tackle a specific mental health issue that is important to them, even if the film is a little rough and unpolished in some ways. I feel like that supports the mission of the festival—it may not always feel slick, but it feels real.
My two favorite things about my interview with filmmaker Caryn Cline are that my cat Hank photobombed it (which I didn’t realize could be done with that virtual background, hehe) and we both said “Good luck with your film festival!” at the same time, which I found endearing.
Caryn made the short but powerful experimental short film Something Went Click, which in its brief runtime paints an expressive portrait of her’s mother’s onset of bipolar disorder in the rural prairie of the 1950s. She is passionate about the hands-on method and curates a film festival in Seattle dedicated to “sprocket-driven, artist-made experimental film,” which is coming right up (but in-person only):
On the lighter side, though somewhat creepy at times, is the short film Squish, written, produced by, and starring Allie Leonard, and directed by Keith Powell. This is an interesting dramedy that doesn’t always go where you think it will. Squish reminded me of a more adult Toy Story movie. In those movies, the toys come to life when the kids who owned them played with them. In this film, the oddly shapeless plushy doll that Allie forms an attachment to comes to life with her own inner anxieties and her desire to escape her thoughts and feelings that she is working through in therapy.
What could have been a trite or sentimental metaphor in the Squish becomes more nuanced as being blank, it starts to reflect the very same worries that Allie was trying to push away by embracing it. Squish starts out as the relief to, and becomes the manifestation of, her anxiety. The humor and chemistry between Allie and her therapist and roommate in this film is fun, and the short ends on a positive note where Allie realizes she can have Squish, and she can have an escape from her thoughts and feelings—it’s just not realistic to think you can have that all the time.
I feel like Hannah Schareck, the writer-director-producer of the chilling German short film Expo In Vivo, trusts her audience just as much as the therapist in her film trusts her patient. While many people understand that unwanted intrusive thoughts can be a large part of obsessive-compulsive disorder, I feel like a lesser-explored concept is that those thoughts can sometimes revolve around harming yourself or others. This could be because that part of it is disturbing and hard to depict on-screen.
Expo In Vivo, based on patient studies of over-exposure therapy, does this very effectively precisely because it is calm, observational, and non-sensational. For a film that involves intrusive thoughts about a knife, it’s about as calm as it could be. The therapist gently draws the patient out of herself and has her describe her compulsive thoughts as the therapy progresses. One of my favorite, most telling lines is when the patient says that she doesn’t have any conflicts with her partner—it’s mostly that she “just doesn’t say anything.”
Expo In Vivo de-stigmatizes intrusive thoughts of harm by showing that they are compulsive, undesirable, and often characteristic of repressed issues. Most importantly of all, it demonstrates that there’s a possible cure for them through therapy. I feel like this short is just the sort of quiet, artful, de-stigmatizing work we should be showcasing.
You can still watch Expo In Vivo for FREE through 11/3 in the virtual festival:
According to one statistic that animator and filmmaker Chari Pere cites in her short film Miscarried, over 25 percent of pregnancies end in a miscarriage. Why do we hear about so few of them? It’s a traumatic experience that’s difficult to discuss and widely misunderstood. Her hope was that by bravely sharing her story she might inspire other women to come forward with their stories and realize they don’t have to suffer alone.
Sure, a miscarriage isn’t really a form of mental illness, but as a stigmatized secret that often carries great shame even though it can’t be helped, it creates a huge “unspoken” footprint on societal and cultural mental health. Chari Pere wrote and animated this “unspoken cartoonmentary” through the lens of her culture as an Orthodox Jew, hoping to spark conversation in the Jewish community and to help women realize that some of the great matriarchs all suffered miscarriages, and it is more common than we realize. Its bright and striking animation softens some of the more painful images of tears and biological functions.
Miscarried was adapted from a comic Pere created in 2017 that received a flood of responses because nobody was speaking openly about the topic of miscarriages. I know women who say they suffered trauma due to their miscarriage, and then a second trauma when they were ashamed to talk about it and couldn’t find any relatable resources. Miscarried is a simple retelling of one woman’s experience that will hopefully reach others and encourage them to open up about a traumatic unspoken experience, and I can’t think of many things more mental health-related than that.
You can watch Miscarried now for FREE through 11/3 in Shorts Block No. 5 of the virtual festival:
The Feast is another film made by a young but passionate assured filmmaker, who goes by the name of Autumn Sky. It’s also a film about a three-step process to cure a mental illness, the protagonist Vienna’s anorexia. The Feast stood out among some of the other eating disorder films we have received as being dressed up in the trappings of the horror genre with its eerie soundtrack of melancholy strings and theremin, bright and garish colors, and creepy imagery. The message, the call placed to, and the conjuring of the leering guide who will help the main character Vienna conquer her greatest fear is reminiscent of Beetlejuice or some other summoning.
The technique that this summoned entity uses with Vienna is a sort of over-exposure therapy, placing tempting, fatty cheeseburgers and milkshakes in front of her and urging her to indulge in them. Though she refuses to eat any of the treats, it is only through the process of realizing how much she has been denying herself and counting calories that she realizes sometimes a little indulgence can be good for your mental health.
