ScreenFish

where faith and film are intertwined

bi-polar disorder

Two Ways Home – Mending the Past

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“No matter how rocky and dry the soil, there’s a chance for life.”

Ron Vignone’s Two Ways Home has won a slew of awards at various festivals around the country. It is a story of broken people and broken relationships. It is also a story of healing and new life.

Kathy (Tanna Frederick, who also produced) has just been released from prison and treatment for a recently diagnosed bi-polar disorder. She returns to her home in rural Iowa, hoping to live with her grandfather Walter (Tom Bower) on his small pig farm. But Walter is in a convalescent home following a heart attack. After some time with her parents (who would like to have Walter declared incompetent to get power of attorney), Kathy begins to clean up Walter’s house so he can come home where she will take care of him.

Kathy’s tweener daughter Cori (Rylie Behr) is resentful of Kathy’s absence the last several years. As Kathy tries to mend that relationship she is encouraged by her ex, Junior (Joel West). Step by step Kathy begins to make progress.

But it turns out that Walter isn’t as whole as he seems. He can be a bit mercurial, blowing up at Kathy when he returns home for redoing his house and throwing out his flea-ridden favorite chair. We also learn that he suffers from untreated PTSD from when he was in the Army. He needs to heal both physically and emotionally.

The characters are treated with compassion and acceptance. We understand why those who know her want to keep her at arm’s length. She understands it too, but is out to prove herself trustworthy.

The film touches briefly on various issues, but then fails to really explore them, such as the difference between corporate farming (Kathy’s father) and the small farm represented by Walter, andthe desire to take control of an elderly parent’s life when they need help, but don’t want it. Even Walter’s PTSD is only an obstacle that comes up late in the film and is quickly set aside. There is even a brief touch of religion and prayer, but that, too, is quickly passed over.

The real focus of the film is restoration of relationships. We don’t see all healing in the broken relationships, but we do see it in some of them. (That allows us to extrapolate that others will heal as well.) The film also serves to make us aware of the ways mental issues like bi-polar disorder may be the cause of some of the rifts in people’s lives, and that with treatment, those damaged relationship may be mended.

Two Ways Home is available on VOD.

Inside the Rain: Bi-polar Comedy

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Inside the Rain strives to take us comedically into the experience of living with bi-polar disorder. College film student Ben (Aaron Fisher, who also wrote and directed) is new on campus. But he is a kind of walking version the DSM-5 diagnostic manual. He has OCD, ADHD, bi-polar disorder, and borderline personality disorder.

When he suspended (and facing expulsion) after an innocent event gets blown out of proportion, he vows to fight by making a film depicting the events to prove his innocence. He enlists the help of Emma (Ellen Toland), a sex worker he has befriended to make the film with him. Along the way, he must deal not only the trials of making a film, but his own psyche. His parents (Catherine Curtin and Paul Schulze) are caring, but they have been through a lot with Ben. They see this film as just another expression of his manic life.

Fisher knows about such mental trials. He also has been diagnosed with all of Ben’s maladies. (It should be noted that this is a fictional film, although Fisher is striving to show what his life was like.) Ben is a likable enough character, but there is always a darkness that hovers around him. He struggles with his psychiatrist (Rosie Perez) to get his medications in balance. He is also trying to find balance in his life between feeling worthless and feeling like he has superpowers (like being able to control the weather). We can sense that Ben’s life will not be easily brought under control.

The film’s climactic (and climatic) scene provides the film with its title, and also serves as a metaphor for Ben’s life. In the midst of a downpour, he finds happiness. The darkness of his life and the hope he strives for do not exist in opposition, but are tied together.

While Ben’s character and his struggle to live with his disorders seems realistic (given the comedic nature of the film), some of the peripheral parts of the story seem less credible. Especially when his psychiatrist promises that she can cure in him six weeks.

While this is a film about someone with bi-polar disorder, there is also a certain universality to the story. The world doesn’t always run smoothly or justly. And often we create our own barriers to finding happiness. Can we, like Ben, find happiness even when our world is filled with trouble?

Photos courtesy of FilmRise

Hollywood Beauty Salon – People of Dignity

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“Dear God, I know it will be better one day. They tell me to trust you, but God, it’s hard.”

Hollywood Beauty Salon is not about hairstyles of the rich and famous. There is no celebrity dishing. For that matter, there are no celebrities. But here are people whose lives and resilience are worthy of our attention.

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The documentary by Glenn Holsten is set in a mental health recovery center in the Germantown area of Philadelphia. We meet a few of those who are working through recovery there. We hear diagnoses (paranoid schizophrenia, PTSD, bi-polar, depression, addiction), but those diagnoses are not where the film focuses. Instead the people themselves, their struggles, their hopes for a better life are front and center. Holsten offers them a chance to design the way their stories are told. It could be through writing a short play, through animation, through music, and then helps them find a way to express what is meaningful in their lives.

The community is working to put together a fashion and “Hair Show” based in the salon at the facility, run by a woman known as Hollywood, who has her own troubled past but is now a Recovery Guide and a Certified Psychiatric Rehabilitation Practitioner. Through her efforts and the support the recovering people give to each other, they are able to begin to find ways of moving beyond what ever diagnoses or past events have controlled their lives.

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Key to the film is the respect given to each of those we meet. The filmmaker is not showing us the bizarre lives that some people live. These are people who have been hurt and in some cases are still hurting. But in Holsten’s film they are people who deserve the dignity that is inherent in us all as beloved children of God. The film offers them a chance to soar (in one case, almost literally) into their dreams. Each of them still has work to do in their recovery, but they are no longer trapped in the darkness that has at times been the defining aspect of their lives.

Photos courtesy Hollywood Beauty Salon