Everything is Fine (Tout est parfait)
Wednesday, September 17 – 7:30pm
Canada 2008. Director: Yves-Christian Fournier
Post-screening discussion with Dammy Damstrom-Albach and Judy Davies.
Everything is most definitely not fine in this compelling feature debut from Quebecois director Yves-Christian Fournier. Sixteen-year-old Josh (Maxime Dumontier) wakes one morning to learn of the suicide of one of his best friends. Another young man is found dead, and then another – all victims of an apparent suicide pact that leaves four teens dead and Josh the only survivor of this group of five friends.
Assuming the post of Chief of Staff at the Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous, Nobel Prize-winning psychiatrist Dr. Richard Thorndyke (Mel Brooks) comes across evidence of embezzlement and unexplained disappearances. He’s hustled off to a psychiatric convention by scheming Nurse Diesel (Cloris Leachman), she of the impossibly pointy breasts and Teutonic moustache, and her snivelling sidekick Dr. Montague (Harvey Korman), who has a predilection for S-M. 
Peter Seller’s Oscar-nominated performance in Being There is one of the most remarkable of his career. Directed by Hal Ashby (Harold and Maude, Shampoo, Coming Home), and adapted by Jerzy Kosinski from his short comic novel of the same name, the film stars Sellers as Chance, a developmentally challenged middle-aged man-child who works as a gardener for a wealthy Washington, D.C. citizen.
Filmmaker Lizzie Gottlieb’s brother Nicky was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism, when he was 21. Although people with Asperger’s can be highly intelligent, they are unable to pick up on social cues. Subtleties of body language, facial expression, tones, or gestures go unnoticed, and their own behaviour can strike others as bizarre and inappropriate. As a small child, Nicky demonstrated amazing abilities. 
The Dignitas organization in Zurich, Switzerland, is the only place in the world where citizens from any country can come to receive assistance in committing suicide. Asserting that the choice to end one’s life is a basic human right, Dignitas founder Ludwig Minelli has indirectly assisted in the suicides of more than 500 people from more than 40 countries.
On a kibbutz in southern Israel in the 1970s, 12-year-old Dvir Avni enters his bar mitzvah year with the knowledge that his dearly-loved mother Miri is mentally ill. When Stephan, Miri’s Swiss boyfriend, comes to visit, he captures Dvir’s heart and makes Miri happier than she’s been in years.
Our society’s preoccupation with body image is reflected in the fact that, at any given time, 70 percent of women and 35 percent of men are dieting. More seriously, a 1993 Statistics Canada survey reported that, among women aged 15 to 25, 1 to 2 percent have anorexia and 3 to 5 percent have bulimia. Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of all mental illnesses, with 10 to 20 percent eventually dying from complications.
Landing soundly in the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction realm,
On the surface, Mike, Erin, and Martha appear to have little in common, but all live under the shadow of bipolar disorder (once known as manic depression), a complex mental illness marked by significant disturbances in mood. Mike is a charismatic young man whose partying lifestyle and abuse of recreational drugs foreshadow a severe manic episode that has him committed to a psychiatric ward.