This is a short documentary on the artist Mindy Alpers, who has a significant history of mental illness and childhood trauma. Her story unfolds through interviews with herself and her mother, but is largely told in the drawings that she did while a child and then as an inpatient on a mental health unit.
Her father was both abusive and ashamed of her. He most likely sexually abused her, and then took out his rage about that on her. When she was sixteen, her mother asked her to leave because she could no longer tolerate the chaos of the family home. Her mother chose her husband over her child. So plenty of trauma, interspersed with some obsessive compulsive traits at the very least. So it is not a happy story at baseline, but Mindy found an expression of her intense feelings through art, both with drawing and with paper mache. I am a mental health professional and it is an excellent movie for the depiction of intense emotions in a graphic form. The sculpture that she does, which is larger than life, has real spirit and life, and on the whole the film is very moving.
Her father was both abusive and ashamed of her. He most likely sexually abused her, and then took out his rage about that on her. When she was sixteen, her mother asked her to leave because she could no longer tolerate the chaos of the family home. Her mother chose her husband over her child. So plenty of trauma, interspersed with some obsessive compulsive traits at the very least. So it is not a happy story at baseline, but Mindy found an expression of her intense feelings through art, both with drawing and with paper mache. I am a mental health professional and it is an excellent movie for the depiction of intense emotions in a graphic form. The sculpture that she does, which is larger than life, has real spirit and life, and on the whole the film is very moving.
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