International Film Awards (2015)
The Closer We Get
The Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival 2015 provided filmmakers from across the globe, who are exploring mental health in their work, with a platform to share their work, engage with new audiences, explore new realities and challenge mental health stigma.
This year saw over 400 entries from 60 countries. Filmmakers and film representatives were in attendance at the awards ceremony from Scotland and England, as well as Italy, Lebanon, Norway and Venezuela-via-London.
As producer, David Puttnam said:
Film is the most powerful medium for developing understanding there has ever been.
Troubled waters
Dancing With Maria
Ida’s Diary
Submerged
Heart of Dust
Jury Prize
Dead When I Got Here
Mark Aitken (UK, 2015) 72m
Compassion, empathy and redemption are central to this lifeaffirming documentary set in Juárez, the world’s most violent city. After coming close to death in the Mexican desert, Josué was rescued and placed in a mental asylum run by its own patients. Six years later, while making this film, he gets an unexpected opportunity to become reunited with his estranged daughter and repair his shattered past.
Dead When I Got Here
Award Winners
Feature Documentary
Winner
The Closer We Get
Karen Guthrie
UK, 2015
87m
Scottish filmmaker Karen Guthrie returns to her family home when her mother Ann suffers a devastating stroke. At the same time, a revelation from her inscrutable father forces her to come to terms with an astonishing secret, giving her one last chance to delve into her family’s past.
This film shows the effects of stroke on a survivor’s mental health with unprecedented access – the darkness and – more surprisingly – the light too. It also shows the effect that family member’s actions have on each other’s mental and emotional wellbeing across a lifetime and is an intimate portrait of the filmmaker’s journey across grieving and acceptance as she reviews her family’s past and her present.
Feature Documentary
Highly Commended
The Silence of the Flies
Eliezar Arias
Venezuela, 2013
93m
Since the 1990s, a mysterious suicide epidemic has been spreading in rural communities across the Venezuelan Andes. Having lost their daughters to suicide, Marcelina and Mercedes are two women who share a tragic fate with many others in the region. This poignant documentary presents an idyllic landscape, permeated with stillness and violence.
Director Eliezer Arias advances a societal perspective by interweaving profiles of several different cases and pairing the audio of his interview subjects with shots of landscapes or other people. Chronic depression comes to seem like a plague afflicting everyone in this isolated region, and though Arias doesn’t force the metaphor, the relentlessly mournful tone is devastating.
Feature Documentary
Highly Commended
Ida’s Diary
August B. Hanssen
Norway, Finland, UK, 2014
63m
Ida’s Diary follows Ida, a young Norwegian woman struggling with an emotionally turbulent life brought about by Borderline Personality Disorder. Using footage from her own video diary shot over the last eight years, the film is about hope and courage, finding your own identity and daring to live.
Anti-Stigma
Winner
Dancing With Maria
Ivan Gergolet
Argentina, Italy, Slovenia, 2014
75m
Dancing With Maria follows elderly Argentinian dancer Maria Fux who has taught her method throughout her life, inspired by her inner rhythms and innate connection with music. At her vibrant Buenos Aires studio, she welcomes dancers from all backgrounds, including men and women with physical and mental impairments. Now, at the age of 90, her biggest challenge is the fight against the limits of her own body. This joyous documentary is alive with movement and passion.
Drama
Winner
Troubled Waters
Toufic Khreich
Lebanon, 2013
26m
Troubled Waters follows the story of Eskandar, who at eight years old left Lebanon to travel to Canada with his mother, four brothers and sister, leaving behind a father with excessive jealousy and violence. Twenty seven years later, Eskandar comes back to Lebanon to try to reconcile with his father. Once in Lebanon he is haunted by his memories which balance him between the past and the present and lead him to his father.
Drama
Highly Commended
The Day They Found Mum Lost Among The Trees
Juanjo Rueda
Spain, 2015
8m
The Day They Found Mum Lost Among The Trees is a film about paralysing grief told with charm and dark wit. The story would end up with my mother surviving wildly, hunting rabbits and fishing with branches.
Animation
Winner
Heart of Dust
Louise Keay Bell
UK, 2015
6m
In an abandoned and decaying asylum, a former psychiatric patient recalls his memories and tries to set himself free. Based on true patients’ stories and using photos from real abandoned asylums.
Short Documentary
Winner
A Tale of Love, Madness and Death
Mijael Bustos
Chile, Germany, 2015
22m
Carlos, the uncle of director Mijael Bustos, is schizophrenic. Although an adult – middle-aged, in fact – he still lives with his elderly parents, who have always refused to place their son in an institution.
Voice of Experience
Winner
The First Hit
Joseph Malone
UK, 2014
10m
The First Hit is an inspiring and harrowing documentary looking at backgrounds to addiction problems within a group of recovering addicts in Liverpool, focusing on the social backgrounds. The director is a doctor who has made a number of films and aims to use the films to education high school and sixth form children about addictions.
Voice of Experience
Submerged
Johanna Wagner
UK, 2011
8m
The five protagonists of this documentary all live with Borderline Personality Disorder, the film is an account of their experiences, going through the symptoms and how dissociation, hyper-sensitivity and self-harm feels for them. You never see the people that are being interviewed, you only hear their voices. The images in the film are tactile, abstract and symbolic. The film uses a lot of subjective camera, where the camera acts like the point-of-view of the character, so that you get the feeling of experiencing the world through their eyes.
Experimental
Winner
Mother Is God
Maria Bäck
Denmark, 2013
30m
Mother is God is a film directed by a daughter about her mother’s illness, with her mother’s input. The mother in the documentary lives with bipolar disorder something which affects her own life and her daughters a lot, she was diagnosed before the daughter was born and has been in and out of mental institutions for much of her life. As things got better with her mother, the daughter decided to make this film, something which has been an important process and statement for both of them. The director wants the film to encourage a new focus on mental illness than the usual portrayals; the result is a very expressive, imaginative and humorous alternative to the normal, narrow reality.
Curator Note
Even at the best of times, filmmaking tends to be an all-encompassing and exhausting process. But when people delve into their own life stories and present them for all to see on the big screen, it truly becomes a labour of passion.
Many of the valiant films in this year’s programme involve individuals who are willing to openly explore what mental health means to them, whether they are in front of the camera, behind it or both. These brave and generous people deserve our gratitude and attention. The Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival is proud to provide a platform for this important cinematic work to reach wider audiences and spark invaluable conversations.
More than ever before, SMHAFF is responsible for screening film firsts. Good Girl and Ida’s Diary, two daring and revealing Norwegian documentaries, are being shown in Scotland for the first time. Dancing with Maria, an entertaining and instructive look at a dance teacher in her 90s, is having its UK premiere, as are Juanicas, Karen Garcia Casanova’s exploration of her Mexican family’s challenging experiences in Canada, and The Silence of the Flies, which examines a mysterious suicide epidemic in the Venezuelan Andes. Dead When I Got Here, set in an asylum run by its own patients, receives its European debut at the Festival.
Many of these films have been selected from submissions to our International Film Competition – the quality of the work received this year was so impressive that to pass it by for programming would have been to overlook some of the very best films available. That was certainly the case for Garnet’s Gold, from the producer of Academy Award-winning documentaries Man on Wire and Searching for Sugar Man, and The Closer We Get, which won Best International Documentary Feature at the prestigious Hot Docs festival earlier this year.
One of the most exciting aspects of this year’s core film programme is that half the features showcased are directed by women – a gender balance rarely found in a notoriously male-dominated industry. By screening films such as Rocks in My Pockets, Signe Baumane’s critically-acclaimed animation on five of her ancestors’ quest for sanity, SMHAFF has created an opportunity to observe female directors at the forefront of autobiographical and intensely personal filmmaking.
Special presentations in collaboration with Document International Human Rights Film Festival – 9999 – and Southside Film Festival – Sunset Boulevard – round out a selection of films spirited in both content and approach. All are certain to stimulate vigorous comment and debate in post-screening discussions, which, as ever, have the potential to be as fascinating as the films themselves.
Every single title in the programme has taken a huge effort to create. These films not only have their hearts in the right place but glow with impassioned artistry. We hope you will be as moved and inspired by the selection as we are.
Richard Warden
Film Curator
Submit Your Film
The Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival (SMHAF) will return from 19 October to 8 November 2026 for its 20th year.
Film submissions are open until Friday 17 April 2026. Find full guidelines and eligibility criteria on our FilmFreeway listing.
