How to Use Dianetics

In this sprawling 33-part epic, Dianetics therapy and the effects it has on human minds are explored.

This Beggar's Description

It's a sensitive, moving doc chronicling the life of Tétrault's brother Philip , a Montreal poet, musician and diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. A promising athlete as a child, Philip began experiencing mood swings in his early 20s. His extended family, including his daughter, share their conflicted feelings love, guilt, shame, anger with the camera. They want to make sure he's safe, but how much can they take?

Library of Dust

In 2004 the Oregon State Hospital, former site of the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, revealed the existence of thousands of corroded copper urns, each containing cremated human remains. Photographer David Maisel captured these beautifully unique urns of forgotten souls on film. Exhibiting their photos revealed secrets, influenced political decisions and reunited families. This film will show how art can stimulate social change and will document the ongoing controversy surrounding a proper memorial for these institutionalized casualties.

Princess Alice: The Royals’ Greatest Secret

The life of Princess Alice of Battenberg, Queen Victoria's great-granddaughter, Prince Andrew of Greece's wife and Queen Elizabeth II's mother-in-law. Born deaf, she faced tremendous hardships but found solace in faith and charity work.

The Last Stop

The Élan School was a for-profit, residential behavior modification program and therapeutic boarding school located deep within the woods of Maine. Delinquent teenagers who failed to comply with other treatment programs were referred to the school as a last resort. Treatment entailed harsh discipline, surveillance, degradation, and downright abuse. Years later, the patients who were institutionalized in this facility still carry the trauma they endured, with mixed opinions on the impact of their experience.

Dépression, de l'ombre à la lumière

Makayla's Voice: A Letter to the World

A teen with autism unlocks a joyous world of self-expression as she shares her voice for the first time using a letter board.

Flee

Recounted mostly through animation to protect his identity, Amin looks back over his past as a child refugee from Afghanistan as he grapples with a secret he’s kept hidden for 20 years.

What About ME?

Inside the dramatic search for a cure to ME/CFS (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). 17 million people around the world suffer from what ME/CFS has been known as a mystery illness, delegated to the psychological realm, until now. A scientist in the only neuro immune institute in the world may have come up with the answer. An important human drama, plays out on the quest for the truth.

Voices from the Shadows

‘Voices from the Shadows’ shows the brave and sometimes heartrending stories of five ME patients and their carers, along with input from Dr Nigel Speight, Prof Leonard Jason and Prof Malcolm Hooper. These were filmed and edited between 2009 and 2011, by the brother and mother of an ME patient in the UK. It shows the devastating consequences that occur when patients are disbelieved and the illness is misunderstood. Severe and lasting relapse occurs when patients are given inappropriate psychological or behavioural management: management that ignores the severe amplification of symptoms that can be caused by increased physical or mental activity or exposure to stimuli, and by further infections. A belief in behavioural and psychological causes, particularly when ME becomes very severe and chronic, following mismanagement, is still taught to medical students and healthcare professionals in the UK. As a consequence, situations similar to those shown in the film continue to occur.

Zen & the Art of Dying

Zenith Virago is an activist and educator who for over 20 years has been returning the coastal region of Byron Bay, Australia to a more communal, celebratory, and creative engagement with death and dying.

Die heilende Sprache der Pferde

Rara Avis

On a sailboat in the middle of the Ocean, five teenagers in rehabilitation are travelling with adults of different ages and backgrounds. Off unknown coastlines, the boat’s space becomes a huis-clos in which everyone faces their own difficulties, the challenge of living together and also the manoeuvres of sailing, the Ocean and its turmoil—until the arrival on land.

Generation A: Portraits of Autism and the Arts

A documentary about young people with autism, and how arts and creative therapies help them to lead fuller lives.

We Are Not Done Yet

Follows veterans and active-duty service members from varied backgrounds who come together to combat their traumas through the written word in a USO-sponsored arts workshop at Walter Reed National Military Hospital.

Unit of Difficult Patients: What Future for the Criminally Insane?

With unique and exclusive testimonies from doctors, nurses, loved ones, and patients we go behind closed doors to examine a high security psychiatric facility that takes care of some of the most dangerous patients.

My Depression (The Up and Down and Up of It)

Based on Elizabeth Swados’ picture book of the same name, this animated short film charts one woman's struggle with depression.

Self Made

In 2007, Gillian Wearing placed an advert – in newspapers, online, in job centers, and elsewhere. It read: “Would you like to be in a film? You can play yourself or a fictional character. Call Gillian.” Of the hundreds of people who replied, seven – chosen through an extended process of auditions, interviews, and workshops – ended up appearing in Self Made. Of those seven, five in particular use the acting technique known as Method to delve into their memories, impulses, anxieties, fears, fantasies, and inner resources to create a series of individual performance vignettes, their personal ‘end scenes’, that reveal with particular intensity and clarity who they really are deep down – or who, in another version of their lives, they might easily have been.

Mini: A Life Revisited

1975 documentary about 11-year-old serial arsonist Michael 'Mini' Cooper, followed by Cooper and the film's director Franc Roddam in conversation with Alan Yentob in 2013.

Days of Madness

Days of Madness portray an incredible odyssey of two mentally diverse and unjustly rejected people who are learning to accept it, faced with the blindness of the society and the health system that made them addicts.