KEPT IN THE PICTURE – ANIMATION AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
Part 4: Biographies
Filmstill aus Rocks in my Pockets (Signe Baumane, US 2014)
We will show two movies, one is short, the other one a feature:
Facing Shadows (Lizzy Hobbs, UK 2015)
In April 2015, seven young people who had been to a Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) for help with their depression came together, with the aim of making a short, animated film about what it is like to suffer from depression as a teenager.
Rocks in my Pockets (Signe Baumane, US 2014)
A main feature of Signe Baumane’s movies is the pointedly handling of difficult and controversial subjects. She speaks frankly about issues a lot of people try to avoid, her biographical series Teat Beat of Sex (2007) is an impressive example for her creative cutoff of an inner and social censorship. Rocks in my Pockets – A crazy Quest for Sanity tells the story of a family. Starting in a not further specified present the narrative leads to Latvia in the 1920s where Anna, Baumane’s grandmother, faces a thoughtful future for she’s well educated and smart. Things become different when Anna marries an adventurous entrepreneur. From now on Anna is facing a life full of suppression. A suicide attempt follows and is kept silent in Baumane’s family for years.
Sounds terrible. But still Rocks in my Pockets is an optimistic movie. For it tells not only the personal tragedies within one family that stands for a gazillion families. It also focuses on the process of an emancipation from a disease. Baumane’s voice-over tells the story of her family throughout the whole movie, the filmmaker appears as a protagonist in a crucial position for she is the one that breaks with the female family tradition of a desperate fate. Being conscious about her own depression the fear from a genetic loading is kept under control for Baumane becomes aware of her life as an artist in New York, full of opportunities and creative choices.
KEPT IN THE PICTURE - ANIMATION AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
Part 4: Biographies
Date: January 12th, 2016
Where: Sigmund Freud Museum, Berggasse 19, 1090 Wien
Start: 7 pm
Free entrance!