CONSTANCE ON THE EDGE
A Monthly Mental Health Film Series Presented by The Cinematheque and the Institute of Mental Health, UBC Department of Psychiatry
The Cinematheque is pleased to join with the Institute of Mental Health, UBC Department of Psychiatry in presenting “Frames of Mind,” a monthly event utilizing film and video to promote professional and community education on issues pertaining to mental health and illness. Screenings, accompanied by presentations and audience discussions, are held on the third Wednesday of each month. Series directed by Dr. Harry Karlinsky, Director of Public Education, Department of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia. Programmed by Caroline Coutts, film curator, filmmaker, and programmer of “Frames of Mind” since its inception in September 2002.
Vancouver Premiere!
Vancouver Premiere!
Juanicas
Constance on the Edge
“On the day that her brother Juan returns to his family home in Montréal from a trip to Mexico, Karina Garcia Casanova begins filming. But this is no incidental home movie. Like his mother, Juan (affectionately known as Juanicas) has a history of mental illness that has occasionally tilted into violence. The real-life drama that unfolds turns out to be a singularly heartbreaking and riveting account of living with bipolar disorder as a family disease. Complicating matters further is Casanova’s own unsettled history as a Spanish-speaking child who grew up in Montreal with a difficult single mother. Her extraordinary first film is at once an unflinching testament to that legacy and a moving document of surviving it” (Geoff Pevere, Rendezvous with Madness). “Deeply affecting, offering a unique and bracingly intimate look at the ravages and collateral damage of mental illness” (T’Cha Dunlevy, Montreal Gazette).
Fleeing their home in war-torn Sudan, Constance Okot and her six children endured ten years in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya before being granted humanitarian visas to Australia. Resettled in rural Wagga Wagga, Constance met director Belinda Mason. What followed was a ten-year quest for acceptance and healing documented by Mason and her all-female crew, resulting in an authentic and intimate portrait of one family’s efforts to feel at home in an unfamiliar place. Dealing with the consequences of trauma and displacement, Constance struggles to adapt and to overcome a crippling depression. While one of her children is accepted into university, another wrestles with drug addiction. Although pushed to “the edge,” Constance remains an indomitable force – a charismatic and resilient woman determined to do whatever it takes to ensure a better life for her children.
Post-screening discussion with Margaret Drewlo and Keturah Wong.
Post-screening discussion with Kirby Huminuik and Frank Kohn.
Canada/Mexico 2014. Dir: Karina Garcia Casanova. 78 min. Blu-ray disc
Australia 2016. Dir: Belinda Mason. 80 min. DCP
Kirby Huminuik, a Registered Clinical Counsellor, holds a Certificate in Global Mental Health from the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma and has long worked with refugees and survivors of torture and political violence.
Margaret Drewlo has a doctorate in Clinical Psychology and is a Clinical Counsellor in the field of suicide intervention and suicide bereavement with the SAFER programme, Vancouver Coastal Health Authority.
Frank Kohn has a Master of Science in Social Work from Columbia University and is the Executive Director of the Vancouver Association for Survivors of Torture (VAST), B.C.’s largest centre for refugee mental health.
Keturah Wong, a Clinical Counsellor with a Master of Science in Mental Health Counselling, has worked in the area of suicide prevention with adults, children, new immigrants and refugees, and sexual assault survivors.
Moderated by Dr. Harry Karlinsky, Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia.
Moderated by Dr. Harry Karlinsky, Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia.
Co-sponsored by the University of British Columbia and the Vancouver Immigration Partnership, City of Vancouver.
Co-presented by the Rendezvous with Madness Film Festival with support from the Canada Council for the Arts. Rendezvous, the world’s first and largest mental health film festival, has been produced annually in Toronto since 1993.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 18 – 7:30 PM
Co-sponsored by SAFER - Suicide Attempt Follow-Up Education & Research. ANN TRUITT, WORKING.
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20 – 7:30 PM
Image copyright of the artist, courtesy of Video Data Bank, www.vdb.org, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Moving-image art in dialogue with cinema www.dimcinema.ca Programmed by Michèle Smith, co-editor of Drawing Room Confessions.
Studio This month DIM Cinema arranges a series of studio visits, beginning with Jem Cohen’s short portrait of the sculptor Ann Truitt (1921-2004) and ending with the ceremonial liberation of Jay DeFeo’s painting The White Rose, weighing over 2,300 pounds, from her second-floor studio in San Francisco. In between, and in their respective studios, Sarah Pucill plays with the blinds, Bruce Nauman walks in an exaggerated manner, and Ken Jacobs goes psychological-psychedelic. The story of two artists and one studio is told in Babette Mangolte’s Edward Krasiński’s Studio. In the 1960s, Krasiński was invited by Henryk Stażewski to share space in Warsaw; after Stażewski’s death, Krasiński created an installation in situ as a shrine to his friend. Ann Truitt, Working | Jem Cohen/USA 2009. 13 min. Blind Light | Sarah Pucill/Great Britain 2007. 22 min. A Loft | Ken Jacobs/USA 2010. Silent. 17 min. Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square | Bruce Nauman/USA 1968. Silent. 10 min. Edward Krasiński’s Studio | Babette Mangolte/Poland-USA 2012. 30 min. The White Rose | Bruce Conner/USA 1967. 7 min. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27 – 7:30 PM
Lives of Performers USA 1972. Dir: Yvonne Rainer. 90 min. 16mm
The first feature by legendary choreographer Yvonne Rainer, soon to become a prominent independent filmmaker, observes a love triangle between three dancers from various points of view. This genre-defying but now classic experimental film was shot by Babette Mangolte (whose work is featured in September's DIM Cinema program) and uses various stylistic devices – rehearsal vs performance, fiction vs nonfiction, dialogue vs intertitles, objective vs subjective descriptions, diegetic vs non-diegetic sound – to document, in the director’s words, “the spectacle of a group of people intensely involved in a kind of work, in the task of performing.” Watch for the final sequence, which recapitulates the Louise Brooks vehicle Pandora’s Box (1929) in a series of tableaux vivants. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 25 – 7:30 PM
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