TRANSCRIPT
[Music] I made my first film, Take These Broken Wings, and people actually started watching it on a fairly wide scale. What started happening to me, not just in the United States but all around the world, is that people started E.A.ing me. People who themselves had been diagnosed with all these extreme diagnoses, ’cause my first film was on recovery from schizophrenia without medication. So a lot of people diagnosed with schizophrenia and diagnosed with other things that were considered psychotic diagnoses approached me and said, “Can you help me find a referral? Please help me find a therapist. Help me find a program that can help me get well from this problem I have without any medication,” or sometimes even with medication. But often it was without medication. They approached me, and it put a lot of pressure on me. That seems like the negative way to put it. The positive way to put it is it put a lot of motivation into me to find these places, to find places where they were doing the work.
So in a way, without even realizing it, it became sort of a second job for me, trying to find referrals for tons and tons and tons of people. I found this exciting because it led me to reach out to tons of therapists that I’d never met, tons of psychiatric survivors that I’d never met, psychiatric survivor organizations, but also these radical, interesting therapy programs, not just around America but around Europe too. One of the programs I came across was the Family Care Foundation in Gothenberg, Sweden, and there was just something about it that blew me away.
I first met Karina on an email list, an international email list for basically, it’s for psychotherapeutic providers who work with psychosis. There are providers from all over the world. It’s a group called ISPS, and Karina was this ferocious person on this list. All I knew her name, Karina Hackinson, and I would see her, and she what scared me about her in a way, but also the thing that really drew me to her is she spoke her mind.
Although I originally planned to make a documentary on ten different alternative programs for psychosis, after I’d already filmed a few places, I decided to narrow down my film to one or two programs. I didn’t know which they would be beforehand, and I realized the only way to find out was to visit and film them first and then decide later. So when I got to Gothenberg, I was scared. Scared because I felt like I owed it to her to let her know that I might actually not be making a movie about her program at all, and I might just be filming stuff for my own archives basically, or for their archives, but for no film.
So I felt that was the ethical thing to do, to let her know up front that I’d been to another few other places, and I basically decided I wasn’t going to make a movie about them, and this might be the fourth place I was going to hit that I wasn’t even going to make a movie about. So I told her this, and I felt so guilty, like I had done something really bad. Come all the way here and had them open their doors and make themselves so available and so vulnerable, and then I might not even use them in a film. My guilt was really eating away at me for that reason. I just hoped she would be super gentle about me in a way. She would let me off the hook.
Initially, at least, that was not how she reacted. How she reacted initially was that she dug her heels in more and tried to convince me why I was making a mistake. She even went so far at one point to say that she thought it was a stupid idea for me not to include them. I was like, “H!” It was eating me alive, my guilt was. Then we talked about it more over a few hours, and she’s like, “Well, I know I’m just having an initial emotional reaction,” and she said, “I understand where you’re coming from, and I appreciate you telling me.”
I thought to myself, “Well, God, maybe I do regret telling her,” but then I thought, “No, I really don’t regret it because I needed to let her know.” But the end result of that was that I was in the middle of doing interviews. I had already interviewed her once by that point, and I got a migraine that night. It was horrible. I had the worst night’s sleep, and the next day I interviewed this therapist, Maria, and I had a splitting headache all through the interview. I think I was nauseated before the interview because the headache was so terrible, and I was just like, “Oh my God, I hope I can function.”
It ended up being okay, and surprisingly, the interview with Maria didn’t turn out half bad. I really liked to go to the family homes at the countryside. Oh, it’s fine! But I really was glad that I talked about that with Karina because in a way it put a lot of stuff on the table. It was to my great relief that actually what I discovered is that I absolutely loved the Family Care Foundation, and I realized this is the kind of place that I wanted to refer clients. This is exactly the reason I did the project. The place was fantastic, and it had so… I mean, I couldn’t refer people there because it’s all for local Swedish people in the Gothenberg area.
But at the same time, it was like what I realized is that people in America might see this, people in other parts of the world might see this film, and they might think, “Well, maybe we could do the same thing.” One thing was that I was asking all these Swedish people to speak in English. This was their second language. Some of them were not that comfortable in English. I was asking farmers to speak in English, and that was hard for them sometimes. They were, and some of the therapists too. It’s like I was asking people questions in English. Sometimes they didn’t always understand my questions. Sometimes I had to repeat the question several times. Sometimes they didn’t know how to say what they wanted. Sometimes it was very, very frustrating to them.
Many people after the interview said, “My God, if I’d only had the chance to say this in Swedish, I could have said it so much more clearly and comfortably.” But interestingly and ironically, I had some people say, “That interview was very, very difficult for me,” and I said, “I know it’s very difficult to speak English.” And they said, “No, it’s not the English. It’s the concepts we’re talking about. It doesn’t matter. It would have been just as hard for me in Swedish.” It’s like I don’t have the emotional vocabulary, even in my own native language, to say it.
There were also some technical problems that I was going through. I was very nervous. I had all camera equipment because I needed to buy all new equipment, so it was really small so it could fit in a very small backpack because I was on the road for, well, six months, and then two months before that in America. So eight months I was on the road where I didn’t have a home, and basically all my clothes, all my camera equipment, all my sound equipment, the tripod, a computer, hard drives, and everything was all packed into one backpack. It was like I was traveling like a hobo.
So I brought basically the bare minimum. When I showed up in Sweden, I didn’t even have a jacket, and I got there in early May, and it was freezing. I was like, “Uh, I’m kind of too cold here. I can’t like function.” And so Karina and some other people were nice. They gave me extra clothes. Another big problem I had, I was just nervous that the equipment would work properly because I just didn’t quite know it very well. I was afraid, like, “God, what if I get all these fantastic interviews, and they don’t download well to the computer? What if there’s blips in them, or I make mistakes in the sound?” Well, as fate would have it, about 98% of the time it worked out fine. A third problem I had, I didn’t…
Have a wide angle lens and I sometimes I was filming groups and filming families, and I needed a wide angle lens. I was stupid; I didn’t buy one beforehand because I didn’t know enough about doing these kind of projects. So I ended up having to go into downtown Gothenburg and buy a wide-angle lens. One of the therapists, Maria, took me there and thankfully I found a place that had one. It wasn’t specifically built for my Canon camera, but there was one that actually fit, and thank God it worked. It made it allowed me to film like much, much wider scenarios, much wider contexts, and it made all the difference with some of the interviews.
When I was 13 years old, I lived in like Terus, you’re D now, in a family in seven years. Another problem I had is that I had a very specific type of tape that fits into my camera. I think I got some here. Where are they? Like this? Yeah, look at these. See, I have these tapes, and I bought, I think I had about 50 or 60 with me that I brought to Sweden with me, each one being an hour long. Well, the problem was that didn’t mean that I had 50 or 60 hours of footage I could capture in Sweden because right after I left Sweden, I was going to go directly to Northern Finland to make a whole another documentary on the open dialogue project there.
What started happening is I started using tons and tons and tons of tapes in Sweden, and I started to get to like, oh my God, I only have like 6 hours left that I can film, and I’m going to be in Sweden another four days. I started getting nervous. I started becoming really, really like anal retentive and selfish about anything that I would film. I’d like go out and film background footage, and I would only film for like 10 minutes ’cause I didn’t want to use up a whole tape. And that’s the totally the wrong way to film a documentary.
One other thing that was very difficult when I was traveling at certain points was that I was just lonely. I was all alone. You know, I was doing all the filming, I was doing all the interviewing, I was the one who was doing ultimately did all the editing, and that was, you know, that was hard. But a lot of it was that I didn’t have my close friends around me. So sometimes, yeah, I would Skype with people, but a lot of times I was away from the internet.
But on the flip side, the flip side of the loneliness factor was that it gave me a huge incentive to really connect with people, and that was the great side of it. What happened is I made friends all over the world, new friends. And I think if I’d gone, let’s say I’d gone with a couple of my friends and we’d all done this project together, it would have been easier in a way, but it would have given me much less incentive to be so open.
Part of what it was is I constantly shared my loneliness. I shared how painful my emotions were when I was traveling in these places, and as a result of that, people tended to be more open with me in return. And as it was, it was like I was kind of lucky in a way because I was spending time around people who were like at the really high end of being like hot shot professional listeners. And in Sweden, even it wasn’t just the professional clinicians; it was also like these farm families that I was going back and visiting. These people were like had decades of experience just being fantastic listeners, and so I trusted them right away. I just felt that these people are safe to talk to.
[Music]
I had actually never filmed a family in action, and especially when I visited the Senson family on their farm, it was incredibly difficult. Just the complexities of a family dynamic. They were talking in two different languages; they were going back and forth between Swedish and English. He will be out here, we can call him. Also, they didn’t know me at all. I was just walking cold into their home, into their farm, and asking them tons of personal, personal questions about stuff that they don’t always talk about, even, you know, with themselves. But then let alone talk about in English with a stranger.
And I had the camera half the time. I was holding it. Sometimes my arm would get tired, and I just set it down on the table. I don’t think I was using a tripod at all, or maybe a little bit. But so a lot of times I was just holding the camera. I was asking questions. I was going all around with the camera, looking from person to person to person and trying to anticipate who was going to talk next. Sometimes I’d be filming someone and then the other person would be saying something important, and I’d fly back and forth.
And then I didn’t want to come in and say, okay, this is how. I didn’t want to come in and be like this fancy director and say, okay, I need you to sit here and you to sit here, and the light sucks here so you can’t sit here, and I need you both to sit next to each other because you’re talking to each other a lot, and I want to catch your interactions with each other. Instead, I was just like, you know, it’s to create a really emotionally awkward situation if I, the stranger who they don’t know, comes in and starts telling people how they’re supposed to behave in their own home.
So instead, I went in with a philosophy that just said, you know, do what you do, be yourselves. I wanted to capture their ordinary life. I wanted to see if I, with my video camera, just walking in as a stranger, could capture some facet of their ordinary life. And by God, I think it worked. I mean, throughout the film, their dogs are running over, barking, and you know, running over, and the lightning struck near the house and killed the electricity. The electricity goes out right in the middle of the video, and I got that on camera.
When she got here, she hurt his very bad. She’s self-destructive now. It’s coming a very loud. At first, I was like, I kind of wanted them to take the dogs and put them in the other room, but I was so glad that I restrained myself from saying that because actually the dogs are fantastic in the film. They are part of the family. There are people who are caring about other people’s. I get word touch if I heard a story like that came from nowhere.
And interestingly, later when Anky and Jonas sent me old archival photographs that they had of their family and of themselves throughout the ages of their lives, every picture they sent me had pictures of dogs in it. Their dogs are their family; their dogs are like their children to them. So here I’m going to come in and tell them to put their dogs in the other room. I mean, that would have been, I mean, intuitively I knew it was the wrong thing to do ’cause I’ve grown up in my family. We had a dog also, and it’s like the dog, he was a part of the family. And anyone who said put the dog in the other room was someone who we wouldn’t have trusted.
But from a video perspective, the dogs were barking, and you know, they’re shooting the sound meter way up into the red zone constantly. And it was just like the director, you know, part of me was going no, no, no, no. But then the real director part of me, the part that knew what I was really going in there for, said just let them be. Don’t tell them what to do. No direction at all.
[Music]
If this film works, I think it’ll be totally worth it ’cause there was something beautiful that those families captured. So something that they shared about themselves that was just really important and really gorgeous. And my God, you know, I made a film trying to show people that there are these alternative places that really work and that really could be better than what we have. But if the modern American mental health system could take note, the world.
The mental health system, the psychiatric system of the world, could take note and just watch these people, these farmers, who they don’t even know what diagnosis is, and they don’t even care. And they don’t have any psychiatric training, but they help people get well.
[Music]