movie world

Award winning filmmaker Ken Paul Rosenthal completed a trilogy of beautiful and provocative short documentary films that re-envision the way we think and speak about our individual and collective mental health in today’s chaotic world. Using his own home movies from childhood, and mental Hygene films from decades past, the trilogy offers transformational content that offers new hope.

As an educator and activist, Ken makes films that exist as works of art and also function as tools for personal and societal transformation. His current projects are poetic mental health documentaries that weave personal and political narratives through natural and urban landscapes, home movies, and archival mental hygiene films.

Mad Dance The Mental Health Film Trilogy includes: For Shadows, In Light, In! and Crooked Beauty.

DVD5 | NTSC 4:3 | 72 minutes | 3.07 Gb + 3% rec
Language: English
Subtitles: see below
Genre: Documentary, Experimental, Short

For Shadows unearths the tangled roots of self-harm from the home movies of a child's formative years. It consists entirely of home movies from the first five years of Ken’s life. We will take a close look at what the film is about, what the home movies brought to the surface, and what challenges specific to this project are unique to working with home movies.
(26 minutes, No dialogues, text info in English)

In Light, In! (*formerly 'A Movement') is a darkly humorous, yet ultimately hopeful commentary on the pervasive disease model of mental illness in Western Culture. Images recycled from archival mental health films—doctors in lab coats, patients in distress, and invasive strategies of mainstream psychiatry—will be edited to original cello compositions by world renowned cellist, Zoe Keating.
(12 minutes, No dialogues)

Crooked Beauty is a poetic documentary that chronicles artist-activist Jacks McNamara's transformative journey from psych ward inpatient to pioneering mental health advocacy. Poignant testimonials connect the fissures and fault lines of human nature to the unstable topography and mercurial weather patterns of the San Francisco Bay Area.
(34 minutes, In English, subtitled in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Hebrew)