The Hero's Journey to the Third Pole

Part road movie, part musical, part serious inquiry into the caverns of the mind. Þriðji pólinn follows Anna Tara Edwards, an Icelander raised in Nepal, and legendary musician Högni Egilsson, as they journey to Anna’s childhood home in the mountain jungles to explore the afflictions and superpowers that come with bipolar disorder.

Holotropic Breathwork: A Conversation with Christina & Stanislav Grof, MD

In this interview, psychiatrist Dr Stanislav Grof, MD and his wife Christina explain holotropic breathwork, and discuss its uses in psychotherapy. Like hypnosis and psychedelic therapy, holotropic breathwork is a method for invoking non-ordinary states of consciousness for therapeutic purposes. Viewers see patients undergoing holotropic breathwork in a group session, and the patients themselves then report their experiences.

From Shock to Awe

How do we heal our deepest wounds? Two combat veterans, suffering from severe trauma, abandon pharmaceuticals in order to seek healing through psychedelic medicines. Recent scientific research has shown that these substances can help people to recover from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Beyond the personal stories, From Shock to Awe raises fundamental questions about war, the pharmaceutical industry, and the US legal system.

Begrijpt u nu waarom ik huil?

The work of Leiden professor Bastiaans on dealing with the trauma of war victims attracts the attention of filmmaker Louis van Gasteren. He decides to make a film about the psychotherapeutic treatment with LSD of a former concentration camp prisoner in the clinic of Bastiaans. Patient Joop is arrested in September 1941 and begins a long hellish journey through various camps, until he is liberated by the Russians. When he returns to his wife, he has become a completely different man. Joop suffers from nightmares and is incapable of normal human contact. With two cameras, Van Gasteren records approximately six and a half hours of the first treatment that Joop undergoes with Bastiaans (four more will follow later). Special attention is paid to details: Joop's hands, the sweat on his forehead, a tear running slowly down his cheek. Van Gasteren reduces the recordings to more than an hour.

PTSD: The War in My Head

This film tells the stories of three British soldiers who died last year following lengthy battles with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). John Paul Finnigan from Liverpool, Kevin Williams from London, and Kevin Holt from Doncaster were in the same regiment, 2-Rifles, which served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Through personal videos, voice notes, interviews and letters, this film reveals the private battle these men fought with their mental health. While candid conversations with soldiers’ friends and families, document how their illnesses affected those around them.

Circus

We all carry hell with us. The filmmaker’s hell exists on a canvas, which he studied carefully in childhood. The mystical picture has many names: Circus, Hell, Game at the Arena. Decades later he finds the painting again. The film unravels as loose ponderings about the plight of being an artist and touches upon the filmmaker’s personal demons. Can he see the painting in a new light?

Ignore Your True Feelings at Your Own Peril

A young woman experiencing a psychiatric crisis must find a way to overcome her body’s deeply ingrained stress response.

Honorable but Broken: EMS in Crisis

Narrated by Sarah Jessica Parker, Honorable but Broken highlights the highs and significant lows -- the emotional toll of the job, lack of mental health resources, pitiful wages and overall undervaluation -- of working in EMS, and looks for viable solutions.

Landscape of our Body

As queer trans and gender non-conforming children of the Vietnamese diaspora, we are fragmented at the crossroads of being displaced from not only a sense of belonging to our ancestral land, but also our own bodies which are conditioned by society to stray away from our most authentic existence. Yet these bodies of ours are the vessels we sail to embark on a lifetime voyage of return to our original selves. It is our bodies that navigate the treacherous tides of normative systems that impose themselves on our very being. And it is our bodies that act as community lighthouses for collective liberation. Ultimately, the landscape of our bodies is our blueprint to remembering, to healing, to blooming.

Julie Mendez - from PTSD to Art

Julie Mendez was a 17 year old teenager when she saw the "be all that you can be" Army recruiting messaging and decided to enlist. Her life would change forever when she was deployed to serve in the Iraq War. Her experiences changed her and she returned home to face feelings of isolation and depression. Always a creative person, Julie turned to art to help her process her experiences and begin to heal her PTSD.

Be Here to Love Me

Chronicles the fascinating and often turbulent life of Townes Van Zandt.

Five Came Back

The extraordinary story of how Hollywood changed World War II – and how World War II changed Hollywood, through the interwoven experiences of five legendary filmmakers who went to war to serve their country and bring the truth to the American people: John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra, and George Stevens. Based on Mark Harris’ best-selling book, “Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War.”

Relative

A filmmaker unearths a pervasive history of multigenerational trauma in her Italian-American family. As decades of secrets, home movies, and long-avoided conversations surface, a family once bound by tradition forges a new path forward.

Bouche cousue

Total Trust

By exploring the relationship between the watched and the watching, our film uncovers the trauma and hope engendered by the Chinese all-surveilling state and lends a voice to those that stand in resilient defiance of such blatant abuse of power.

Reverberations

Thirty years after the end of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1991), a filmmaker seeks to explore the trauma inflicted by the war on her family. Reverberations traces the history and politics of a nation in disarray in an intimate mother-daughter portrait that unravels the trauma that defined an era lost to history and a generation’s silence about its long-standing effects.