The Last Stop

The Élan School was a for-profit, residential behavior modification program and therapeutic boarding school located deep within the woods of Maine. Delinquent teenagers who failed to comply with other treatment programs were referred to the school as a last resort. Treatment entailed harsh discipline, surveillance, degradation, and downright abuse. Years later, the patients who were institutionalized in this facility still carry the trauma they endured, with mixed opinions on the impact of their experience.

2017-04-29 | en

How to Use Dianetics

In this sprawling 33-part epic, Dianetics therapy and the effects it has on human minds are explored.

2009-01-01 | en

Dosed 2: The Trip of a Lifetime

Laurie, a terminally ill cancer patient and loving mother of four, is granted the right to legally use magic mushrooms to treat her end of life anxiety. She then embarks on a remarkable journey of personal transformation and healing while exploring lesser known possible cures for cancer, like cannabis oil.

2022-08-03 | en

Library of Dust

In 2004 the Oregon State Hospital, former site of the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, revealed the existence of thousands of corroded copper urns, each containing cremated human remains. Photographer David Maisel captured these beautifully unique urns of forgotten souls on film. Exhibiting their photos revealed secrets, influenced political decisions and reunited families. This film will show how art can stimulate social change and will document the ongoing controversy surrounding a proper memorial for these institutionalized casualties.

2011-01-28 | en

Makayla's Voice: A Letter to the World

A teen with autism unlocks a joyous world of self-expression as she shares her voice for the first time using a letter board.

2024-01-21 | en

Flee

Recounted mostly through animation to protect his identity, Amin looks back over his past as a child refugee from Afghanistan as he grapples with a secret he’s kept hidden for 20 years.

2021-06-17 | da

What About ME?

Inside the dramatic search for a cure to ME/CFS (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). 17 million people around the world suffer from what ME/CFS has been known as a mystery illness, delegated to the psychological realm, until now. A scientist in the only neuro immune institute in the world may have come up with the answer. An important human drama, plays out on the quest for the truth.

2016-01-01 | en

Rara Avis

On a sailboat in the middle of the Ocean, five teenagers in rehabilitation are travelling with adults of different ages and backgrounds. Off unknown coastlines, the boat’s space becomes a huis-clos in which everyone faces their own difficulties, the challenge of living together and also the manoeuvres of sailing, the Ocean and its turmoil—until the arrival on land.

2020-04-27 | fr

The Wolf Suit

How much can you trust your childhood memories? Director Sam Firth investigates, sweeping her parents into the experiment and on a journey into the past.

2021-10-22 | en

Days of Madness

Days of Madness portray an incredible odyssey of two mentally diverse and unjustly rejected people who are learning to accept it, faced with the blindness of the society and the health system that made them addicts.

2018-02-28 | hr

The Green Creature Within

This film tells the story of an adolescent psychotherapy group that met at an outpatient clinic for two hours a week over a period of two years. Art and drama were the major therapeutic tools, along with music, movement, poetry, and filmmaking. The varied expressive modalities are demonstrated in this film, as well as the different roles the therapists played in facilitating the group process. In addition to telling the story of the group, this film also includes detailed case studies of two of the members. It is a rare example of multimodality group therapy unfolding over time.

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Louis Theroux: A Place for Paedophiles

Louis has gained access to Coalinga Mental Hospital in California, which houses more than 500 of the most disturbed criminals in America, convicted paedophiles. Most have already served lengthy prison sentences, but have been deemed unsafe for release. Instead, they have been sent here for an indefinite time. Spending time with those undergoing treatment, Louis wrestles with whether he can ever allow himself to believe men whose whole history is defined by deception and deceit.

2009-04-19 | en

Die heilende Sprache der Pferde

2012-05-31 | de

Voices from the Shadows

‘Voices from the Shadows’ shows the brave and sometimes heartrending stories of five ME patients and their carers, along with input from Dr Nigel Speight, Prof Leonard Jason and Prof Malcolm Hooper. These were filmed and edited between 2009 and 2011, by the brother and mother of an ME patient in the UK. It shows the devastating consequences that occur when patients are disbelieved and the illness is misunderstood. Severe and lasting relapse occurs when patients are given inappropriate psychological or behavioural management: management that ignores the severe amplification of symptoms that can be caused by increased physical or mental activity or exposure to stimuli, and by further infections. A belief in behavioural and psychological causes, particularly when ME becomes very severe and chronic, following mismanagement, is still taught to medical students and healthcare professionals in the UK. As a consequence, situations similar to those shown in the film continue to occur.

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Rolanda Polonsky, Sculptor

Enter the imaginative world of acclaimed sculptor Rolanda Polonsky, who had been a resident of Netherne Psychiatric Hospital in Coulsdon, Surrey for 26 years when this film was made. One of the positive aspects of her illness, described in the film as a schizophrenia, is that it "tapped a deep source of mystical vision and human feeling" which finds expression in her work.

1971-01-01 | en

My Depression (The Up and Down and Up of It)

Based on Elizabeth Swados’ picture book of the same name, this animated short film charts one woman's struggle with depression.

2014-04-17 | en

The Truth and the Seeker

"The Truth and the Seeker" is an award-winning documentary from Hemstock Films that follows a young single mother battling anxiety, addiction, and a deep disconnection from her body. Through plant medicine and profound inner work, and guided by Todd and Stacy Richey—creators of “The Answer Model,” a transformative framework for unraveling human dysfunction—she confronts generational trauma and her own patterns, striving to break the cycle for herself and her daughter.

2025-08-09 | en

Unit of Difficult Patients: What Future for the Criminally Insane?

With unique and exclusive testimonies from doctors, nurses, loved ones, and patients we go behind closed doors to examine a high security psychiatric facility that takes care of some of the most dangerous patients.

2017-10-08 | en

Generation A: Portraits of Autism and the Arts

A documentary about young people with autism, and how arts and creative therapies help them to lead fuller lives.

2015-11-06 | en

Self Made

In 2007, Gillian Wearing placed an advert – in newspapers, online, in job centers, and elsewhere. It read: “Would you like to be in a film? You can play yourself or a fictional character. Call Gillian.” Of the hundreds of people who replied, seven – chosen through an extended process of auditions, interviews, and workshops – ended up appearing in Self Made. Of those seven, five in particular use the acting technique known as Method to delve into their memories, impulses, anxieties, fears, fantasies, and inner resources to create a series of individual performance vignettes, their personal ‘end scenes’, that reveal with particular intensity and clarity who they really are deep down – or who, in another version of their lives, they might easily have been.

2011-09-02 | en