Frames of Mind

Thursday, December 18, 2003 - 7:30pm
Co-sponsored by the Mood Disorders Association of BC

The Laughing Club of India

USA/India, 1999. Director: Mira Nair

Is Laughter the best Medicine? Although the scientific evidence is mixed and confusing, Dr. Madan Kataria, a Bombay physician, clearly believes in laughter’s therapeutic effect. In 1995, Kataria started the first laughing club in Bombay with a group of friends. Less than ten years later, there are now over 1500 laughter clubs worldwide, with over 450 in Bombay alone.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

USA, 1986. Director: John Hughes

The definitive teen comedy and emerging cult classic. This warm-hearted romp stars Mathew Broderick as Ferris, a bright high school senior who feigns an illness so he can spend a day in down town Chicago with his girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara), his best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck), and a shiny red Ferrari.

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Wednesday, November 20, 2003 - 7:30pm
USA 1999. Director: Daniel Yoon
Post-screening discussion with Daniel Yoon

Post Concussion is the story of a young San Francisco management consultant named Matthew Kang whose life changes dramatically following a motor vehicle accident. Matt (played by Daniel Yoon) gets hits by a car.

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Thursday October 16, 2003 - 7:30 pm
USA 1993. Director: Allie Light

Co-sponsored by Women and Mental Health Committee of the Vancouver Community Mental Health Services of Vancouver Coastal Health, and the Women and Mental Health Discussion Group of the BC Centre of Excellence for Women’s Health.

A ground-breaking, Emmy-award winning documentary about women and mental illness. This moving and informative film features seven women – including Light and Karen Wong, the film’s associate producer – describing their experiences with depression, bipolar disorder, multiple personalities, schizophrenia, euphoria and recovery.

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Thursday, September 18, 2003 - 7:30pm
USA 2001. Director: Tim McCann
A post-screening discussion with Dr. Sean Flynn
Co-sponsored by Canadian Mental Health Association, Vancouver/Burnaby Branch

Jackson (Canadian actor Michael Risley) is a seemingly well-adjusted young Manhattanite, working an anonymous tech-sector job and engaged to be married to cocktail waitress Kim (Adrienne Shelley). But all of a sudden, things are being moved around on his desk at work, cryptic email messages pop up on his computer screen and a 30-second TV commercial for a women’s perfume, called Revolution #9, seems encoded with hidden messages just for him.

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Thursday August 21, 2003 - 7:30pm
USA 1960. Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Special lecture presentation by Mark Harris

Phoenix office worker Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), desperate to find a way to be with her lover, Sam Loomis (John Gavin), embezzles $40,000 from her boss and heads for California in search of Sam.

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Thursday July 17, 2003 - 7:30 pm
Sweden, 1976. Director: Ingmar Bergman
Post-screening discussion with Mark Harris

Dr. Jenny Isaksson (Liv Ullmann) is a successful psychiatrist who returns for a visit to her childhood home (where her grandparents now live) while her husband and daughter are away together on vacation. Hoping for a brief respite and a chance to rest, she instead finds herself transported back to her childhood, and unhappy memories, nightmares and hallucinations threaten to overwhelm her.

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Thursday, June 13, 2003 - 7:30pm

GERMANY, 1926. Director: G.W. Pabst
A post-screening discussion with Dr. Endre Koritar

A remarkable Expressionist feature in which a professor (Werner Krauss) is driven into a state of terror by strange intense nightmares accompanied by compulsive thoughts of murdering his wife. Based on an actual patient treated (and cured) by Sigmund Freud, and made with the collaboration of Freud’s colleagues Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs, “Secrets of a Soul” is the first time in film that psychoanalysis was represented as a treatment for mental illness.

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Thursday, May 15, 2003 - 7:30 pm
ITALY/FRANCE, 2001. Director: Nanni Moretti
A post-screening discussion with Dr. Michael Myer
Co-sponsored by The Compassionate Friends

Nanni Moretti’s extraordinary drama The Son’s Room, which won the Palme D’Or at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, tells the deeply affecting story of a tight-knit, middle-class Italian family having to come to terms with a devastating loss.

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Thursday, April 17, 2003 - 7:30pm
USA, 2002. Director: Mark Samels
Post-screening discussion with Dr. William MacEwan
Co-sponsored by the BC Schizophrenia Society

A Brilliant Madness is the story of a mathematical genius whose career was cut short by a descent into madness. At the age of 30, John Nash, a stunningly original and famously eccentric MIT mathematician, suddenly began claiming that aliens were communicating with him and that he was a special messenger.

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Thursday, March 20, 2003 - 7:30pm
USA, 1993. Director: Peter Weir
Post-screening discussion with Dr. Steven Taylor.
Co-sponsored by the Anxiety Disorders Association of B.C.

Director Peter Weir earned well-deserved critical acclaim for this underrated drama. Weir’s subtle use of visual symbolism imparts a mystical overtone to what is essentially a psychological character study of a man who survives an airplane crash

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Thursday, February 20, 2003 - 7:30 pm
USA, 1998. Director: Susan Stern
A post-screening discussion with Karen Dias MA(cand), DipC, RPC.
Co-sponsored by Awareness & Networking Around Disordered Eating (ANAD)

The Barbie doll is not just the world’s most popular toy, she’s a Rorschach test, revealing attitudes about sexuality, body image, gender roles and creativity in an increasingly mass-produced world. Journeying from Barbie conventions to anti-Barbie demonstrations, from girls’ play dates to Barbie web pages, Barbie Nation plumbs the cult of the Barbie doll, telling the Barbie stories of men, women and children.

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Thursday, January 16, 2003 - 7:30pm
USA, 1994. Director: Deborah Hoffmann
Post-screening discussion with Dr. Martha Lou Donnelly
Co-sponsored by the Alzheimer Society of B.C.

With profound insight and surprising levity, Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter chronicles the various stages of a mother’s Alzheimer’s disease and the evolution of a daughter’s response to the illness. As the illness and film progress, the desire to cure the incurable gives way to an acceptance which is finally liberating for both daughter and mother.

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