I’ve been a big fan of SMHAF’s film programme for years, so I’m delighted to be working with the festival this year as a Film Hub Scotland New Producer, helping to devise, organise and deliver the regional film programme.
As part of this paid placement, I’ve curated a series of screenings in Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen, films that explore creativity, identity and mental health, and speak to how cinema can help us understand ourselves and connect with each other.
The theme of this year’s festival is Comfort & Disturb, and what draws me to these films is the way they hold both in the same breath. They don’t flinch from pain – from addiction, illness, trauma – but they also find beauty in intimacy and in the act of looking closely.
They invite us to sit with discomfort and discover something tender within it.
Film is a feelings business, and I’ve always believed in cinema as an empathy machine. As the film critic Roger Ebert said:
When I go to a great movie I can live somebody else’s life for a while. I can walk in somebody else’s shoes. I can see what it feels like to be a member of a different gender, a different race, a different economic class, to live in a different time, to have a different belief.
For me, that’s what cinema at its best can do: remind us that the things which disturb us can also be the places where empathy, connection and even comfort take root.
When I take a step back from the programme, another strong connecting thread is family, a theme that runs through much of my own work: the families we’re born into, and the families we make out of our friends.
Each of these films, in their own way, wrestles with what it means to belong, to love people who might hurt us, to define ourselves beyond the stories we’ve inherited and to find connection even in isolation.
A Want in Her
Monday 20 October
Filmhouse, Edinburgh
I’m very excited to be back at the newly reopened Filmhouse on the opening night of this year’s festival, and I can’t think of a better place to start.
Myrid Carten’s A Want in Her is a raw, intimate portrait of the filmmaker’s relationship with her alcoholic mother. Opening with a mystery – Carten’s mother, Nuala, is missing, last seen days ago in a bar in Belfast – Carten picks up her camera and stitches together phone recordings and recreation to create a rich, compassionate portrait of a family in crisis. Her background as a visual artist is at play here, capturing the beauty and a real sense of gallows humour in this difficult, incredibly personal situation.
This screening includes a Q&A with Myrid, and is presented in collaboration with Scottish Documentary Institute as part of Doc Screen, an initiative bringing more independent documentaries to the big screen at Filmhouse.
An Angel at My Table
Tuesday 21 October
Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA)
Jane Campion is one of my favourite filmmakers, a director who’s unafraid to make work that’s strange, sensual and deeply empathetic, and I’m really excited to be bringing this film to Dundee in 35mm – it’ll be my first time seeing it on the big screen, too! An Angel at My Table tells the story of writer Janet Frame, who was institutionalised and nearly given a lobotomy before her first book saved her life.
The film examines the intersections of mental health and creativity, showing how Frame’s writing became a lifeline in a world that repeatedly tried to define her, presented in Campion’s inimitably intimate, bold, singular style.
I’m really excited to have commissioned programme notes from writer Rose Ruane, who makes connections between Frame’s life and work and the work of artist Mary Bishop.
DIAGNONSENSE
Wednesday 22 October
New Kings, University of Aberdeen
DIAGNONSENSE
dir. Ane-Martha Tamnes Hansgård (Norway, 2024) 1h 12m
I love archive film and personal documentary, and I’m really excited to present the UK premiere of Ane-Martha Tamnes Hansgård’s debut feature as part of this year’s festival.
For fifteen years, Hansgård lived under a series of psychiatric diagnoses that shaped how others saw her – and how she saw herself – and DIAGNONSENSE is her way of taking that story back.
Drawing on years of personal footage, she tells her story and rebuilds her identity on her own terms, creating something strange, powerful and profoundly moving.
This screening is presented in partnership with WayWORD Festival at the University of Aberdeen, and Ane-Martha will join us for a virtual Q&A after the film.
Each of these films offers a different perspective on how we make sense of our inner worlds – through art, through memory, through the act of looking and being seen.
They’re about what happens when we turn the camera on ourselves, and the ways that filmmaking can be an act of healing, resistance and connection. They ask us to confront difficult truths – about family, mental health, trauma and identity – but they do so with care, curiosity and compassion.
They remind us that discomfort can be a doorway to empathy, that facing what unsettles us can help us see ourselves and others more clearly and that cinema can be a space where we are both shaken and held, all at once.
Michael Lee Richardson
