Clair - Obscure close captioned...

My film is going to be screened at the Abilities arts festival in Toronto during the last week of October. I was elated to find this out two weeks ago. It came at the perfect time - I was wondering if my film career was down the toilet. This gave me hope to continue with my message - and try to change the stigma that still hangs over mental illness.

This is the actual script from the film. The italics are a voice over in the beginning of the film, and 2nd part is when one of the creepy doctors speak to an auditorium of other doctors.

Must be seen to be believed.
Working on getting it up on Youtube.

It's the first time that I ever sat down to transcribe the monologue (which was a stream of thought process - me and a microphone, a cigarette in a darkened recording studio at 3am one January morning). It's pretty heavy duty.

I hope you enjoy it....


**
(opening sequence - series of disturbing still black and white images of the mentally ill)

You have a healthy, or can have a relatively healthy young adult, or a young person turning into adulthood, who beings to go into a psychosis, withdrawals from the people that he or she loves, and is distant from those people; at the same time that individual, that child, is clearly in enormous emotional pain, psychological pain, can't interact with people and has a disease which can last for years.



I don't like going back, and remembering. It brings me too close, to things that i wanted to forget, things that I need to forget, to go on, to live normally again.
I've come through this and I have so many questions with no answers: what is reality, who are we, where are we going, what's beyond the darkness and the silence? it's so hard to remember what happened, it's so far away. Maybe, it's far away it because that's a safe distance for me to keep from those ghosts. Sleep was my escape, and I did that often.Getting up in the morning and facing the day and having to think of getting up and living was awful thought.There would be people around me, yet I felt like like there was nobody. I'd walk and wander around aimlessly, tyring to pass the moments, hoping that the next would be better than the last.


When I'd walk, alone downtown, I knew that people would look at me; and when they would, I'd ask myself if they knew that I was sick? And if they could tell If it was in my eyes, or if I was just giving off this kind of energy? I thought that people knew.

Sometimes I became so afraid that people were following me. I was afraid that I was going to be shot, or killed, or that the world would end.
It was awful.

My imagination went into fifth gear and out of control. My reality began to shift, and mould to this paranoia, which was growing and growing.
I lived in constant fear.
I'd often thing of the Romans and their infamous blood baths, how they would sit in hot springs and slit their wrists and let the blood flow. The hot water made the blood thinner and would take away the pain.

I thought it would be so easy just to let death come like sleep.
Sleep.
Just to let death come like sleep.
The nights would go on forever. I'd wait for sleep, but sleep would never come.
My reality became altered, and what reality I had, I felt like I was losing grip of it. Gradually.
I was losing control of myself.

I went through a battery of tests, where my body became property of the hospital and the sterilized hand of curious doctors who longed to dissect my mind.

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, our patient today is manic depressive with paranoid delusions. Since the 1920's, we've known that this disorder is located in the located in the pre-frontal lobes. Traditionally, we've used more drastic and invasive procedures including the pre-frontal lobotomy and other forms of psychosurgery to treat this problem.However today we will employ a newly developed chemical therapy which acts on the same malfunctioning neuro-connections that we know to be associated with paranoia and depression.

This procedure serves the same function as severing the pre-frontal lobes and has the same pacifying effect without the physical disfigurement or more drastic side effects of a lobotomy. There is however, some pain and disorientation associated with this therapy since the injection is made directly into the brain itself. It is therefore necessary to anesthetize the patient before we being. Hopefully she will be cooperative.

These depressions, they were a part of me, they became part of my landscape.
This depression, this feeling - it grabs you, it suffocates you.
It's hard.
I've become completely desperate.
It hurts.
It's so heavy.
I have no strength for anything else.
I'm lost.
I'm afraid.

**

(fade to black - then this poem appears on black in blue type over silence)

I've seen insanity,
my mind has run
to hell and back.
I've seen the emptiness
and live in its void .

**

the end