Film is a storytelling format that can splice directly into a person’s awareness of something. Yet in hindsight, when has the medium showcased the sensitive and nuanced topics of mental health and/or addiction?

Hindsight is a short film retrospective that traverses the topic of mental health and addiction within the National Film Board’s extensive archive. This co-presented program looks back almost seventy years to dynamically highlight a spectrum of stories and filmmaking techniques. Films sampled from the archive include Breakdown (1951), a fictitious film about a seemingly well-adjusted young woman who’s schizophrenic episode has landed her in a modern mental hospital. The Agony of Jimmy Quinlan (1978), a portrait documentary depicting the life of Jimmy Quinlan, one of an estimated 5000men who struggled with addiction in the alleys of late 1970s Montreal. Street Kids (1985), a succession of montaged black and white photographs voiced over to reveal a glance into juvenile prostitution. Nowhere Land (2015), a documentary narrated by Inuit Bonnie Ammaaq and her family tells their faint memories of attempting to live while the government-manufactured community of Igloolik becomes an elegy for Indigenous displacement and mental health. XO RAD MAGIQUE (2019) is an animated video work both psychedelic and hypnotic in nature, that takes you on an abstract journey living with schizophrenia in daily life.

Accompanying this NFB retrospective is a pre-recorded video interview with local Toronto artists Katelyn Gallucci, Greg Mccarthy and Derek Coulombe. In conversation, the artists will discuss the activity of looking back. How do the films bring up feelings of hindsight? How do we navigate these feelings? Why do we as artists sample from archives? Why is it important to create discussions around archival material?

Set in the stunning landscape of the Lesotho mountains, this unique film follows the story of an 80-year-old widow, Mantoa. Mantoa eagerly awaits her son’s return from work in the mines; instead, she learns of his death. Her immense grief is framed within the Provincial decree to relocate her village in order for development of a dam and reservoir, threatening to flood and erase everything that she holds dear. Mantoa takes up a spiritual mantle and fights for the land, community and her desire to bury her child on the land they were raised on. A colourful, heartfelt and personal story full of the strength, history and the power of this lone matriarch in the face of great change. Taking her last stand, Mantoa asserts her way of life, where the living and the dead stand together to bear witness to the changing landscape, making us question the price of progress.

Desana Justino lives in Manaus, a port city in the Amazon rainforest, having left behind his home in the wilderness many years ago. As an Indigenous man, he tries to navigate between the disappearing natural landscape and his own life. His daughter has to decide if she will pursue medical school in Brazil and the potential separation weighs heavy in the air as she worries about her father’s health. Working as a security guard to support his family as seemingly supernatural forces manifest, Da-Rin’s camera intimately captures a man still intensely connected to the land. Justino is a quiet man caught between the old ways of his people and the industrialized ways quickly taking over; juxtaposing images of confining industrial cityscapes over the simple and quiet way of life more in tune with nature. A languid, hypnotic story that both makes his yearning for a simpler and sturdier time palatable and makes us question our place in it.

Following the screening of The Fever, join us for a virtual Q&A with Brazilian filmmaker, visual artist and former documentarian Maya Da-Rin to discuss the making of her first fiction feature, her country’s “post-apocalyptic state” and the catastrophic impact of Bolsonaro’s brutal regime on Brazil’s Indigenous communities. Moderated by Jaene F. Castrillon, a multi-disciplinary artist, filmmaker and Rendezvous with Madness programmer.