NZ Film Festival: Asylum Pieces

World Premiere.

Changes in official attitudes to mental illness are reflected in the architectural history of New Zealand psychiatric institutions in Kathy Dudding’s delicately layered, emotionally loaded essay film.

Dudding’s film takes off from an unfinished photographic project undertaken with a partner who didn’t stay around to see it through. Photographs of the abandoned Porirua asylum would, emulating a Japanese tradition, evoke the poignance of impermanence and the passage of human suffering. Keeping faith with the aesthetic, Dudding expands and politicises the project. She incorporates fragments of the public record – archival films, public documents, literature – which signify shifts in fashion and policy culminating in the dismantling of asylum walls and the return of the depressed and tormented to the ‘community’.

The polemic that emerges has a tragic cadence. Will our current reliance on the pharmaceutical industry look any less arbitrary or destructive a social construction to future generations than the straitjacket and EST look to us now? — BG

Director: Kathy Dudding
Year: 2010
Running time: 75 mins

Screenplay/Photography/Editor: Kathy Dudding
Still colour photography: Jonathan Hewison
Animator: Euan Frizzell
Sound design: Ray Beentjes
Sound mix: Park Road Post
Narrator: Peter Hambleton
Voices: Erin Banks, Eddie Campbell, Madeline McNamara
Colour and B&W/DigiBeta

Event listed by MCH Admin

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