Directed by Clare Samuel

Logline: A daughter examines the life and premature death of her schizophrenic father.

Synopsis: What could a cosmology of one person's life look like? A daughter examines the life and premature death of her father, who had a troubled relationship with the psychiatric medical establishment and was passionate about ecology, politics and space travel.

Distribution Contact: WFG

More Details

RUNTIME: 16 Minutes
GENRE: Documentary, Experimental, Animation
PRODUCTION FORMAT: HD
LANGUAGE: English
LOCATION: Ontario
TECHNIQUES: Computer Animation, Live Action
KEYWORDS: Mental Illness, Schizophrenia, Family, Death, Ecology, Nature, Female Filmmaker

Director's Statement: This video work is part of a larger project of still and moving images called Malcolm, focusing on my father, and our relationship, while he was alive and after his death at 58. Malcolm lived with a schizophrenia diagnosis and had repeated periods of medical “non-compliance”. He died after heart surgery, and I believe that his psychiatric treatment; the way that he was classified as aberrant, and the medication that left him lethargic, was a major factor in his physical health.

The work tells supressed histories of mad experience, as advocated by the burgeoning Consumer/Survivor/X-inmate movement and the academic field of Mad Studies. I also live with so-called ""˜mental illness' and feel deeply the ambivalence that the c/s/x nomenclature expresses towards the medical model of madness (a term reclaimed by ‘mad-activists’), in how it both supports and dehumanizes different individuals. I find most available linguistic and cultural approaches to this painfully prevalent element of human experience to be inadequate. I make visual art because it says things that words often cannot.

Each person is a world, when they die a world has ended. The writer Sylvia Nasar describes the defining symptom of schizophrenia as “the profound feeling of incomprehensibility and inaccessibility that sufferers provoke in other people”. Sometimes I felt like my father was a planet that I and the rest of my family were in a gravitational orbit around. Malcolm (as I always called him, a distance established at an early age) had a ridiculous sense of humour, he would talk to anyone, was deeply passionate about ecology, and believed space travel was imperative for our survival because of global warming. Other times I felt like he was a black hole, unknowable and sucking in our energy and sense of self. I always wished for more connection, for us to understand each other beyond making puns and our shared interest in astronomy.

The film is made up of footage from Malcolm's funeral and the days clearing out his flat, as well as medical imaging of his body and of my own. The audio includes me reading from his letters and his many political leaflets on eco justice. In many ways the work is an attempt to know Malcolm better, in spite of space and time.