International Competition

What happens to people who suffer from mental illnesses and commit violent crimes? Some are sent to forensic psychiatric hospitals – once called asylums for the criminally insane – where they disappear from public view for years. Emmy award-winning filmmaker John Kastner gained unprecedented access to one such facility, the Brockville Mental Health Centre. He follows the treatment of patients struggling to gain control over their lives, so they can return to a society that often fears and demonizes them. This remarkable documentary addresses these issues with unusual candour and warmth amid the larger-than-life personalities in the Centre and Kastner’s moving and empathetic drive to remove the stigma of mental illness.