Friday, November 4
5:30pm-6:30pm
Opening Night Gala
Blackberry Lounge

7:00pm
Opening Night Feature
TIFF Bell Lightbox
350 King St West
Reitman Square
Director in Attendance

Rescreening
Saturday November 12
1.00pm
Workman Arts
651 Dufferin St

Sisters & Brothers
Carl Bessai, Canada, 2011, 90 min, HDCAM, English, Rated 14A

Carl Bessai returns to Rendezvous with Madness with a comedic, endearing look at dysfunctional families and the bonds that hold them together.  Featuring an ensemble cast including Glee’s Cory Monteith, and Corner Gas’ Gabrielle Miller, Bessai’s deeply embedded camera and improvisational approach makes Sisters & Brothers an unusually intimate view of the frustration, joy, and love that is siblinghood.

Nothing is easy as these characters struggle to make sense of their relationships, their shared experiences, and their responsibilities to each other.

The slow cooking turmoil between Justin (Monteith) and his brother Rory (Repeaters’ Dustin Milligan) plays out against the dizzying heights of stardom.  While Louise’s (Miller) loving relationship with her brother Jerry (Repeaters’ Benjamin Ratner), is tempered by his mental illness.  Resentful Maggie (Normal’sCamille Sullivan) chaperones her younger sister Nikki (Repeaters Amanda Crew) as they follow a dubious producer to LA.  And the dysfunctional relationship between Sarah (Kacey Rohl) and her mother Marion (Normal’sGabrielle Rose), is turned on its head when Sita (Leena Manro) shows up from another world unexpectedly.

Counter to intuition, Bessai creates a heightened sense of reality as he draws attention to the artifice of film. Cut with a comic book light-heartedness that festival regulars may not expect after the dramatic approaches of Normal (RWM 2007)and Repeaters (RWM 2010), Sisters & Brothers is another intriguing and powerful look at mental health from one of Rendezvous with Madness’ favourite filmmakers.   

Director’s Bio:
Carl Bessai was born in Edmonton and studied in Toronto at the Ontario College of Art & Design and York University. He has worked extensively in film and television as a cinematographer, writer, producer and director. He directed the documentaries Brothers from Vietnam (‘98), Out of Orbit: The Life and Times of Marshall McLuhan (‘99) and Indie Truth (‘02). His fiction features are Johnny (‘99), Lola (‘01), Emile (‘03), Severed (‘05), Unnatural & Accidental (‘06), Normal (‘07), Mothers & Daughters (‘08), Cole (‘09), Repeaters (‘10), Fathers & Sons (‘10) and Sisters & Brothers (‘11).

Saturday, November 5
1:00 pm
Workman Arts
651 Dufferin St

Yelling to the Sky
Victoria Mahoney, USA, 2011, 95 min, English, 35mm, Canadian Premiere, Rated R

Seventeen year-old Sweetness O’Hara has very little to lose: her family life is a mess, she can’t walk the streets of her neighborhood without the threat of brutality, her high school’s hallways aren’t any safer, not to mention her home, leaving her increasingly isolated and looking for a way out.  Unfortunate decisions follow, violence begetting violence, and Sweetness gets on a path far more dangerous than the one she started on.

Although Yelling to the Sky is Victoria Mahoney’s directorial debut, her visual authorship shows an incredible maturity and creates an experience for the viewer that is as engaging as it is eye-opening.  While other films of this genre endeavor to encapsulate and moralize “life in the ghetto,” Mahoney avoids this trap by presenting the complex realities of urban existence unqualified by stereotypes or coded themes.  The end result is a human story that connects universally to its audience regardless of background: social, economic, or racial.     
           

Actress Zoe Kravitz, who plays Sweetness, puts in a tremendous performance and holds her own opposite Gabourey Sidibe (famous for her lead role in the film Precious) and an impressive cast of character actors. 
           

Simply put, Yelling to the Sky is a festival darling not to be missed.         

Director’s Bio:
Marking her debut feature film, Victoria Mahoney brought Yelling to the Sky to the Directors and Screenwriters Sundance Institute Labs and was named an Auerbach Fellow, Maryland Fellow, Annenberg Fellow, Cinereach Fellow and IFP Narrative Lab fellow. 

Collect Call
Christopher Mills, Canada, 2010, 5 min, English, Digibeta, Rated G

A moody, multi-dimensional animation, Collect Call is a meditative short film that follows a young woman as she faces her mortality, death, and her ultimate renewal.  Part “goodbye lullaby,” part steampunk hallucination, and part music video (Metric), director Christopher Mills pushes the aesthetics boundaries of the medium without sacrificing access to the underlying story.

Saturday, November 5
3:00 pm
TIFF Bell Lightbox
330 King St West
Reitman Square

Isolerad (Corridor) 
Johan Lundberg and Johan Storm, Sweden, 2010, 80 min, Digibeta, Swedish with English Subtitles, Brussels European Film Festival: Cineurope Prize 2010, Rated 14A

Like most medical students, Frank is as studious and ambitious as he is over-worked and sleep-deprived. It’s a lonely life, up half of the night pouring through textbooks, in class the rest of the time, expected to put all of that theory into practice.  Expectations are high and so is the stress.  Pressure and isolation: it’s a dangerous recipe, especially for one as naturally high-strung as Frank.  Just a tap in the right place might crack such a person. A heavy blow after that might shatter them.
           

Directors Johan Lundborg (who plays Frank) and Johan Storm explore this theme in Corridor, the erosion of sanity, the kind which could happen to anyone under just the right conditions. 
           

For Frank, it begins with strange noises coming from the apartment above him.  His annoyance leads to curiosity.  He makes some investigations, which involves him directly in a couple’s violent relationship. Overwhelmed with fear when he realizes the danger he has put himself in, it soon becomes paranoia-then panic-and the line that divides the real and the imagined disappears in shadow and leads to the unthinkable.
           

Corridor is a masterful thriller crafted in the Hitchcockian tradition and is sure to please those that appreciate moody subtlety and suspense.   

Directors’ Bios:
Johan Lundborg graduated from the Film School at Gothenburg University in 2003. He has written, shot and edited a number of short films and made the award winning documentary Moving Adult Cats. Johan was also cinematographer on Corridor.
Johan Storm graduated from the Film School at Gothenburg University in 2003. He has written about film for the magazine "Filmkonst" (Film Art) and Gothenburg Film Festival’s daily "Draken" and worked as film critic for the daily newspaper "Arbetarbladet.“

Saturday, November 5
7.00 pm
TIFF Bell Lightbox
330 King St West
Reitman Square

U.F.O.
Burkhard Feige, Germany, 2010, 95 min, Blu Ray, Toronto Premiere, German with English subtitles, Rated 14A

In 1986, Bodo’s life changed forever.  He’s always lived in a world of science fiction, but the destruction of the Challenger spacecraft, and the accident at Chernobyl have brought the perils of life aboard a starship a little too close to home.  Strangest, and most troubling of all, his mother Christa, seems changed since the disasters.  She’s always been the first to reenact a Klingon standoff, but things get weird when she starts vacuuming radiation clouds out of the living room.  As his father, Robert struggles to bring Christa back to earth Bodo finds it hard to differentiate between truth and fantasy. His mother’s always known so much, why can’t people accept that she’s telling the truth about radiation, the government, and the sinister agents who keep watching their house.
      

In U.F.O. Feige has created a heartwarming historical portrait of a family coming to terms with mental illness.  The relationships between mother and father and sons, aren’t subject to the dark turns so common of cinematic portrayals of schizophrenia.  Instead under Feige’s steady hand Bodo’s active imagination blends the real life scientific disasters and Christa’s advancing psychosis into a heartwarming tale of discovery, acceptance and love.

Sunday November 6
1.00 pm
Canadian Shorts
Workman Arts
651 Dufferin St

Pins and Needles
Nicole Nyholt, Canada, 1 min, Digibeta, No Language, Rated PG

Pins and Needles is an experimental film that creates an aura of anxiety by focusing its gaze on a relatively simple moving image.  Disembodied sounds add to the effect and we are brought to a state of abstract reflection, making us guess at the director’s intentions while we absorb its realization.

Wilderness
Dawn Wilkinson, Canada, 2011, 10 min, Digibeta, World Premiere, English, Rated PG

A mother copes with her son's schizophrenia.  All day she worries, wondering where he is and if he will home tonight.  Her fears are well founded.  Her son has a long history of dropping off the face of the Earth.  Predictably, he disappears again, pushing his mother's to the edge.

Nowhere Elsewhere
Annick Blanc, Canada, 2010, 15 min, 35mm, French with English Subtitles, Festival International de Films de Femmes de Creteil, France: Best French Speaking Short, Rated PG

The courage Jade needs to visit her mother waivers, interrupting her family’s road to see the ailing matriarch.  To regroup, they spend the night at a motel where her son begins to have visions of the Virgin Mary.  Jade if forced to confront the fact that her mother's madness may run in the family.

Beyond the Pale
Maureen Bradley, Canada, 2010, 18 min, Digibeta, Toronto Premiere, English, Rated 14A

Kate Tubridy’s life is imagined and recounted by her great, great niece.  Driven by curiosity, Maureen Bradley researches the life of her distant aunt and learns the dark truth about mental healthcare in the 1890s. <

I Need My Best Friend Back
Gina Simone, Canada, 2011, 15 min, Beta sp, World Premiere, English, Rated 14A

Sunday, November 6
3:00pm
TIFF Bell Lightbox
350 King St West
Reitman Square

The Way Up
Shirly Berkovitz, Israel, 2009, 52 min, Beta sp, North American Premiere, Hebrew with English Subtitles, Best Documentary: Romania International Film Festival, Rated 18A

Meet Lian: an androgynous young woman doing her best to survive.  Homeless, addicted to drugs, she begs for money on the streets of Tel Aviv.  As she approaches a group of men, they ignore her, but once they realize she’s a girl they try to buy a kiss.  She refuses.  She’s like that.  Beaten down but not broken. 
           

While not hustling on the street or crashing in condemned buildings, Lian dreams of a family and attempts to track down her birth mother.  Born in Romania when abortions were illegal and orphanages were overwhelmed, Lian’s life began tragically.  Given up by her teen mother, she was adopted and brought to Israel, but her situation didn’t improve.  Running from an abusive mother, at 14, she landed on the streets with nowhere to go and no one to call, the alleyways, and forgotten hollows became her home. 
           

Director Shirly Berkovitz follows Lian, and the colourful cast of real life characters she encounters on her journey from junkie to daughter, struggling to change her life for the better. The Way Up isn’t easy for Lian, but the alternative is much worse.

Director’s Bio
Shirly Berkovitz’s first feature documentary 100% (2005), was screened at the Docaviv- Documentary Film Festival.  Her next feature, The Way Up (2009), was nominated for an  Israeli Academy Award in 2010. Shirly is working on a new documentary called Lies in the Closet.

Latzuf (Floating)
Inbal Gibrolter, Israel, 2010, 33 min, Beta sp, North American Premiere, Hebrew with English Subtitles, Rated 14A

Sunday, November 6
7:00pm
TIFF Bell Lightbox
350 King St West
Reitman Square
Filmmaker in attendance

Part Time Fabulous
Alethea Root, USA, 2011, 78 min, Blu Ray, Canadian Premiere, English, Best Narrative Feature Audience Award: Berkshire International Film Festival 2011, Rated 14A

What is the real face of clinical depression?  In the media, depression is all over the map, from a comedic liability, to a life threatening psychosis.   No matter what the depiction, it’s hard to find many examples where filmmakers have truly captured the affect of living with the disease.  But, sometimes a film nails it on the head, and in Part Time Fabulous, director Althea Root strikes a powerful and at times, painfully realistic, portrayal of living and loving with clinical depression.

Part love story, part autobiography, and part testimonial, Part Time Fabulous is more than just hard facts. Blurring the lines between drama and documentary, Root examines clinical depression on screen with an accuracy rarely captured.  In Mel (Jules Bruff), she has created a heroine, graced with talent but crippled by a disease that threatens everything she cares about.  Her boyfriend, Don (Bjorn Johnstone) supports her, but struggles to understand the barriers that depression creates between them.  Throughout, the narrative is intercut with documentary footage from survivors of depression, adding poignancy to the film, and grounding Bruff’s depiction in real life experiences.  Authentically written with evocatively captured performances, Part Time Fabulous is a must for anyone who wants to know the truth about depression

Sunday November 6
7:00 pm
Workman Arts
651 Dufferin St West

An Illustrated Artist Talk by Jenn E Norton

The imaginative work of Jenn E Norton is not quite a surrealist dreamscape, but an actively dreamed scape, a place built with architecture of wonder and rumination.  Ordinary objects and activities become strange through the bending of their longstanding expectations, often achieved through disjunctive content realistically glued together with composite editing.  This uncanniness constructed through digital intervention invites new approaches and consideration to the familiar.  Her cast may be her cats, inanimate objects or multiple versions of herself in situations that derive from her immediate experience, yet the formal considerations allude to greater ontological questions.  

Jenn will discuss how working intimately with the technology used in the production of her practice in a DIY capacity marries intuitive and formal approaches to her creative process.  Working in near isolation, honing her technical skill as an editor, animator, compositor and sound designer via online tutorials and trial and error, Jenn creates moving images outside of a rubric of traditional cinematic roles of director and producer. 

Norton will also discuss the melancholy present beneath the visual glitter. Curator and artist Ufuk Gueray recalled a quote by Francis Bacon in an essay to describe Norton’s work, “Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life.”  There is no overt violence in Norton’s practice, but darkness lurks beneath the glittery surface [...].

Artist Bio:
Jenn E Norton is a Canadian artist working with interdisciplinary media including video, installation, sound and kinetic sculpture to produce performative, critically engaged work that plays with the elastic qualities inherent of digital technologies. 

Sunday November 6
8:00 pm
Experimental Film Program
Workman Arts
651 Dufferin St
Program Unrated

Wee Requiems:
Curated by Deirdre Logue and Erik Martinson

Wee Requiems is a program of short experimental videos in lament. Mourning for the increasingly complex worlds of animals, plants and people, these works wander in and around both the real and alien, animated, mutated, recorded and illustrated. Fables of savagery and shame, death in the everyday, dilapidated interiors and microscopic utopias sit side by each, calling out for our sympathy, asking for our forgiveness, needing our attention.

How to Care for Introverts
 Leslie Supnet, Canada, 2010, 1:48 min

An animated instructional video on how one should deal with people whose personalities are characterized by extreme shyness and reserve.

Exercises in Faith: Bird
Julieta Maria, 2010, 1:52

“Bird is a close up of my hand holding a canary, while it moves, trying to free itself from the grip…The video reflects on fragility, beauty and violence, questioning the limits of our ethical relationship to one another and to the world.” - Julieta Maria

Wee Requiem
Jenn E Norton, Canada, 2010, 7:03 min

Through recontextualized imagery, video can provide its viewer with the opportunity to remember an event differently. Wee Requiem explores the ability of the mediated moving image to articulate a propositional reality, or prosthetic memory. For seven minutes we observe a “wee requiem” for the passing of a fallen nuisance—a pest—who has been recast as a beloved protagonist.

Beauty Plus Pity
Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby, Canada, 2009, 14:19 min

Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby propose that existence is abject, farcical, and messy. In their richly textured seven part video, Beauty Plus Pity, Duke and Battersby employ live action footage, scavenged images, and simple animations to create episodic structures that evince a simultaneously utopian and dystopian worldview.

The Fire Theft
Isabelle Hayeur, Canada, 2010, 9 min, Toronto Premiere

The Fire Theft includes shots of the Olympic flame relay (Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics) and the Keith Sadler Foreclosure Resistance; it reminds us that major sports events benefit a handful of corporations, and are used as a pretext for real estate speculation and gentrification.

Thalé
Barry Doupé, Canada, 2009, 5:07 min

Thalé is a series of alien flowers modeled after decorative fiber optics ornaments.

Golden Room
Michael Stecky, Canada, 2008, 5:11 min, Toronto Premiere

Beginning with images of flowers and insects, and ending with fantastic visions of microscopic utopias, Golden Room burrows itself deeper inward using disintegration as a metaphor for loss and the passage of time.

Cartoon For Those Who Have A Certain Fondness For Ideas but Are Tired Of Thinking
Steve Reinke, Canada, 2010, 2:15 min, Toronto Premiere

Simple line drawings form and wriggle against a solid background, each linked to a verbal proposal. In the end, everybody's happy as the possibilities proliferate. Nobody gets hurt.

Monday November 7
1:00pm
Workman Arts
651 Dufferin St

22nd of May (22 Mei)
Koen Mortier, Belgium, 2010, 86 min,Beta, French with English Subtitles, Golden Palm: Mexico International Film Festival, Rated 18A

As discussions of terrorism move beyond the immediacy of an attack to the psychological impact of the survivors, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder(PTSD) receives a lot of attention.  Despite the discussion, the symptoms of PTSD are as devastating as they are misunderstood.  In the Belgium film 22nd of May (22 Mei) Sam’s (Sam Louwyck) mind shatters after a traumatic attack literally blows apart the tranquility of an otherwise normal day. 

As beautiful as it is haunting, director Koen Mortier’s camera moves through the aftermath of the explosion without reprieve as Sam struggles to save its victims.  After making a startling discovery, Sam breaks, and in the dizzying moments that follow he’s forced to meet each of the players in the tragedy – ending with the bomber himself. 

In this poetically realized examination of loss and grief, Mortier follows up his critically acclaimed debut Ex Drummer with a masterfully nuanced film.  Mortier’s decision to focus on the emotional and psychological states that immediately follow an attack give an emotional depth to the film that borders on the surreal.  Despite its immediacy, the 22nd of May attests that once the visual scars of an attack fade the pain and suffering continues, the emotional nightmare endures. 
           

Monday November 7
7:00 pm
Workman Arts
651 Dufferin St

People in White
Tellervo Kalleinen, Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, Netherlands, Finland, 2011, 65 min, Digibeta, Dutch with English subtitles, Rated 14A

In this performative doc, directors Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen and Tellervo Kalleine manage to subtly undermine the power imbalances inherent in psychiatric treatment by capturing the haunting reflections of people who’ve been through it.  The filmmakers not only strike an understated tone, but their original approach to the subject matter makes for a refreshing change from the usual “system done me wrong” story.

The stories here are shocking.  As the subjects share and re-enact their experiences their honesty and intimacy draw you in, and it’s hard to come away untouched.  “I have experienced some beautiful things…but some horrible things, too,” one man says as he recounts his lifetime of mental illness and hospitalization.  The same themes emerge as patients struggle desperately for empathy and recognition as human beings only to be frustrated by a mental health system that demonizes symptoms of mental disease and seeks control above wellness.

Ultimately, People in White challenges our perceptions of not only traditional mental health practices, but also our perceptions of what it is to be ill.  Certainly, many of the stories shared are indicative of mental illness, but far too many sound more like prisoners struggling against their captors.  And in such a place, how many of us would behave differently?

Directors’ Bios:
Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen are artists and filmmakers based in Helsinki, Finland. They began their collaboration in 2003 by organizing “The First Summit of Micronations” for the Amorph! festival.  People in White is their first documentary film.

Art Works
Julie Pasila, Canada, 2011, 19 min, Beta, English, World Premiere, Rated PG

Art Works explores the transformative, regenerative, and healing power of the arts through a look at the practices of three Toronto artists: Annalise, Melissa, and Miles. The lives of these artists intersect through Workman Arts, a not-for-profit professional arts company working in partnership with Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

Tuesday November 8
7:00pm
Workman Arts
651 Dufferin St

We’ll Get Used to It
Mohsen Ostad Ali Makhmalbaf, Iran, 2009, 52 min, Farsi with English subtitles, Beta sp, Canadian Premiere, Rated PG

The institutionalized asylums of runaways, the abused, and the mentally ill are hard places to live.  In Canada, we look back at our institutional history and shudder, but in parts of the world some of the most glaring problems of our past continue still.  For the young women profiled in Mohsen Ostad Ali Makhmalbaf’s We’ll Get Use to It, the hardest part about getting better may be that they’re trying to do it in Iran.

Suffering from serious to non-existent mental health problems, Yeganeh, Hanieh, Shahnaz, Farzaneh and Behnaz have each run away from home and all of landed in the same state-run facility.  As they struggle to overcome stigma and prejudice, each girl is forced to confront her family, and try to resolve the conflicts that drove them away.

Mohsen Ostad Ali Makhmalbaf takes us inside a world rarely shown on film and his verite approach allows his subjects to redeem and damn themselves in equal measure.  We’ll Get Used to It follows five different women, but in the end, it’s a portrait of a culture and the people within it who struggle for the right to be treated with dignity and respect.

Director’s Bio:
Mohsen Ostad Ali Makhmalbaf was born in Tehran in 1982. He is a graduate of film editing from the University of Applied Sciences. He has made several student films and established the company Tolou Film in 2004, producing Winston Cinema, Abbass’s Wedding, and The Day of the Jackal.

Portrayals of Suicide: Shifting the Lens

Industry panel discussion and multi-media interactive exhibition. Featuring clips from: The Next Day, Jason Gilmore, Canada, 2011; The High Level Bridge, Trevor Anderson, Canada, 2011; Burning Blossom Kathryn Threlkeld, Canada, 2010

Suicide is a leading cause of death in men ages 25 to 29 and 40 to 44, women ages 30 to 34, and the second cause of death among adolescents. The statistics are astounding and yet relatively unknown to the average Canadian as suicide is not something that is regularly covered in the media. Why? Because evidence suggests that extensive media reporting on suicide can trigger other suicides. However, evidence also suggests that in order to reduce and prevent suicide, the public needs to be made aware and the issues discussed. All of this therefore begs the question, how do we talk about suicide? Dr. Isaac Sakinofsky, a psychiatrist and suicidologist, leads us in a dialogue with filmmakers, digital media creators and journalists as we discuss the role and responsibility of those who portray suicide in the media.

The Next Day
The Next Day interactive experience is produced by Pop Sandbox in co-production with the NFB in association with TVO as part of the NFB-TVO Calling Card program.

An industry presentation of documentary approaches to suicide; in conversation with filmmakers, academics, journalists and clinicians exploring the changing attitudes around presenting this difficult issue.

This event is FREE for journalists, mental health experts working in suicide, and filmmakers. RSVP to nfbmediathequeonf@nfb.ca SPACE IS LIMITED

Wednesday November 9
6:00 pm
Comedy Shorts Program Workman Arts
651 Dufferin St

Hello Caller
Andrew Putschoegl, USA, 2011, 6 min, Digibeta, English, Toronto Premiere, Rated 14A

Andrea calls a suicide hotline, not for help but to declare her fatal intentions.  The man on the other side of the phone keeps on mistaking her name for Can-dre-a, which he insists is the long form of the name Candy.  This launches the conversation into strange and racially confused waters. 

Distilled Love
Joe Kicak, Canada, 2010, 14 min, Beta, English, National Screen Institute Drama Prize, Rated 14A

Relationships are hard, especially when addictions and a beret-wearing acorn named Pierre are thrown into the mix.  Distilled Love is the story of a young couple divided by recovery and facing their past and present the only way they know how: by acting like children until things are painfully sorted out.  

What the Fud?
Phillipp Berg, Canada, 2011, 4 min, Beta, English, Rated PG

Anthropomorphizing can be a bad habit, especially when the object in question has a voice, a dream, the body of a swan, is abandoned in a dumpster, and begs for deliverance.  Throw in a woman trying reforming her garbage picking ways and what we have is more than a bad habit: we have What the Fud?    

Blunderkind,
Zak Mechanic,USA, 2011, 20 min, English, Blu Ray, Canadian Premiere, Rated 14A

Henry Jameson came into this world packing a preternatural genius.  Naturally, by the age of 12 he began dabbling in time travel.  The goal of his first experiment: to send his best and only buddy George (who strangely reminded Henry of mustard) a week into the future.  Unfortunately, his calculations are off, way off.

Monster Flu
Brian Wiebe, USA, 2010, 6 min, French with English Subtitles, Blu Ray, Canadian Premiere, Rated 14A

A man is trapped at home by his profound fear of germs.  His sole companion is his pet monster, an expressive-eyed puppet whose furriness is matched only by the sensitivity of his soul.  Fed up with his master's crippling illness and living room masturbation, the monster runs away. 

Cataplexy
John Salcido, USA, 2010, 7 min, English, Blu Ray, Canadian Premiere, Rated PG

Cataplexy is a real disease, one which is triggered by emotions and results in sudden paralysis.  It is as rare as it is potentially hilarious, especially when one’s emotive trigger is love—and one isn’t just using the obscure illness as an excuse for keeping things casual. 

Wednesday November 9
8:00 pm
Workman Arts
651 Dufferin St
Unrated

Acclaimed as ‘one of the most talented comics in the business,’ Tazz brings his unique worldview of life after mental illness to Rendezvous with Madness.  His years spent struggling with undiagnosed bipolar disorder has left him determined to entertain and inspire.  In his words, “It’s easier to deal with through laughter. People don’t realize they’re being educated when they laugh. I like to make them laugh until they cry and then laugh some more…it’s the bi-polar way.”  Using comedy to help others comes naturally to Tazz.  While setting the world record for longest continuous stand-up routine to promote the CBC Winnipeg Comedy Festival, he joked about the tricks he was using to keep his ADHD under control for eight and a half hours.  His national appearances including the Just for Laughs Festival, the Moncton Comedy Festival and gala performances at the CBC Winnipeg Comedy Festival have left appreciative audiences praising his routine of recovery and rebirth as the “Bi-Polar Buddha.”   As he says, “It’s time to give stigma a bad name.”

The RWM show will be hosted by Yuk Yuk’s founder and Toronto-native Mark Breslin, followed by a conversation with Big Daddy Tazz and Dr. Kwame McKenzie, from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

Biography
Know as the “Bi-Polar Buddha,” Tazz is equal parts comedian and motivational speaker who likes to enlighten, educate and inspire.  His one-man shows have drawn rave reviews and standing ovations from coast-to-coast.  Tazz currently co-stars in the popular APTN sitcom Mixed Blessings.

Thursday November 10
12:00pm
The Centre For Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH)
33 Russel Street

CAMH: Grand Rounds Presentation Intervention Canada

Intervention Canada Series Producer Karen Wookey joins psychiatrist Dr. Benoit Mulsant.

Rendezvous with Madness presents a Grand Rounds presentation featuring clips from the reality television program Intervention Canada and conversation with Series Producer Karen Wookey and CAMH Physician-in-Chief Dr. Benoit Mulsant. 

Intervention Canada profiles “people whose addictions have brought them to a point of crisis or estranged them from their friends and loved ones.” Based on A&E’s long running Emmy Award-winning Intervention series, an intervention led by trained mental health practitioners and the subject’s friends and family is staged at the end of each episode. 

In the last decade, television depictions of mental illness have changed.  Increasingly, reality television is providing a forum for discussion and even creating opportunities for treatment.  In an exclusive presentation to CAMH, Karen Wookey and Dr. Benoit Mulsant explore the Intervention Canada team’s approach to developing one of the most controversial series in mental health. 

With supporting material Wookey and Mulsant will also discuss the clinical value of therapeutic intervention and its place in documentary production, and reality television.

Rendezvous with Madness would like to invite all Grand Rounds visitors who would like to participate in a broader discussion about Intervention Canada to join us at the TIFF Bell Lightbox Thursday night.

Thursday November 10
6:30pm
TIFF Bell Lightbox
350 King St West
Reitman Square

Intervention Canada
Karen Wookey, Canada, 2011, 44 min/episode, English

Rendezvous with Madness in partnership with DOC Toronto present an evening with Intervention Canada featuring episode screenings and discussion at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.  A post screening discussion features Intervention Canada Series Producer Karen Wookey, Interventionist Andrew Galloway, CAMH Bioethicist Barbara Russell and subjects from the episodes.  

Intervention Canada is based on A&E’s long running Emmy Award-winning Intervention series, and profiles “people whose addictions have brought them to a point of crisis or estranged them from their friends and loved ones.” A surprise intervention by the subject’s friends and family is staged at the end of each episode.  Featuring some of the most gripping and harrowing profiles of addiction ever screened at the festival the episodes feature: a young man addicted to alcohol and crack cocaine whose poisonous relationship with his mother sends him spiraling out of control, and a lesbian couple on the brink of collapse, addicted to alcohol, prescription drugs and each other.      

Increasingly, mental health issues are finding an audience through reality television, but the debate rages around the ethics of profiling ill people and whether or not reality programs contribute to the stigma that surrounds mental illness and addiction.  Documentary filmmakers have struggled with these questions for years, but the unprecedented success of reality TV has made the answers more important than ever.  Join Rendezvous with Madness and DOC Toronto as we delve into the world of mental illness, addiction, and reality television to explore how the creative team behind one of Canada’s hottest new shows maintains the fine balance between exploitation and recovery.                             

Panelists: Karen Wookey, interventionist Andrew Galloway and Bioethicist Barbara Russell

Thursday November 10
9:30pm
TIFF Bell Lightbox
350 King St West
Reitman Square

Gods of Youth
Kate Twa, Canada, 2009, 95 min, Blu Ray, Canadian Premiere, English, Rated R

To make them feel invincible, Kamikaze pilots were given methamphetamine before their missions.  Fearless and quick, endless endurance and confidence to the point of euphoria: it was only a matter of time before the drug was used for an entirely different type of flight. 
           

Gods of Youth is a film about drugs, no question about it, but it isn’t like others of its genre.  It doesn’t take us on a leisurely narcotic trip; rather, it shoots us out of a warp-speed, body-jumping, speed-talking, face-twitching, endorphin mega-cannon.                
           

The story follows two young men and a young woman as they go on an epic, high octane, hypersexual, multi-day meth bender.  The good times are epic, but is nothing compared to what’s to come afterwards.
           

A gritty moral story about the dangers of drug use, Director Kate Twa doesn’t glorify or spare us any of the misery and madness that affect those who use meth, not to mention all of the innocents that are caught in its collateral shockwave.  With her explicitly detailed creative choices, Twa shows the damage and ruin up close, translating the viewing experience into an electrified visceral event.        

Director’s Bio:
Gods of Youth is Kate Twa’s film directorial debut. She is the Artistic Director of Cucumber Satellite Theatre and Film Society and co-owner of mutant films.  To date Kate has directed over two dozen stage plays, and written three stage plays, which have been produced across Canada.

Friday November 11
6:45pm
TIFF Bell Lightbox
350 King St West
Reitman Square

Finding Kind
Lauren Parsekian, USA, 2010, 76 min, Beta sp, Canadian Premiere, English, Student Choice Award: Toronto International Film Festival, Sprockets, Rated PG

Mean girls: they’re not just celluloid villains created by Hollywood writers to entertain audiences.  Girl to girl bullying is a real problem and much worse than most people realize.  Fueled by jealousy, rage, frustration, and peer pressure the emotional and psychological trauma inflicted on a daily basis seems to be getting worse.  In Finding Kind, Lauren Parsekian, and Molly Thompson travel across the United States to confront the problem head on.
                      
Shaped by their own painful bullying experiences, Lauren and Molly seek out girls just like them, who have had to overcome the trauma of bullying, and back stabbing.  Shockingly, these women are all too easy to find, and the same stories emerge across the country – girls who have been profoundly hurt by people they considered friends, scarred by people they loved.  It’s hard to imagine that a problem this large has gone overlooked for so long, but the intimate and personal nature of the stories overwhelmingly drives the point home.

Full of moments of revelation, shock, heart break, and forgiveness, Finding Kind isn’t your average documentary; rather, it’s the beginning of a movement, a living and evolving awareness, spreading its message of compassion and understanding with the end goal of ending all the unnecessary hatred and strife.

Director’s Bio:
Lauren Parsekian graduated from Pepperdine University with a degree in Television and Film Production.   At 22 years old, she decided to pick up a camera and start a dialogue about bullying within female friendships.  Finding Kind is her directorial debut.  

Friday November 11
9:30 pm
TIFF Bell Lightbox
350 King St West
Reitman Square

Amphetamine
Scud, China, 2010, 97min, Cantonese and English with English subtitles, Digibeta, Toronto Premiere, Rated 18A

Attraction is a complicated thing and relationships more so.  In Amphetamine, director Scudhas found a relationship that is tangled and intricate, a love story made nearly impossible by issues of emotional trauma, hardcore drug addiction, and conflicting sexual identities. 
           

In Daniel, a successful gay executive with the soul of a saint, and Kafka, a self identified straight man, born into poverty and filled with pain, Scud points an unblinking eye at the euphoric heights and devastating depths of improbable love.  From different worlds, the two meet by chance and soon a powerful bond draws them together.  With love to guide him, Daniel tries to pull Kafka out of the morass of his trauma, but their happiness is fragile and it isn’t long until the insidiousness of Kafka’s psychological problems and confused sexual identity threatens to overwhelm their romance. 
           

Beautifully shot, Scud paints the vicissitudes of Kafka’s journey to redemption against the bright lights and gritty underbelly of Hong Kong.  From sewers, to soaring skyscrapers Daniel and Kafka guide each other onwards, but with each step forward it becomes harder to tell who’s leading whom.  Will Daniel redeem Kafka in the happiest of endings, or will Kafka lead them both to ruin, addiction and destruction?

Saturday November 12
8:00pm
Closing Night Gala: Carnivale of the Mind
Featuring the Lens of Illusion
Workman Arts
651 Dufferin St

The Lens of Illusion
A night exhibit of (un)realities with Dr. Bruce Ballon

For your consideration, a collection of possible inner truths and outer deceptions - or is it inner deceptions and outer truths? Please join your guide on a mysterious multimedia journey through distorted perceptions and uncertain realities.  Experience mysteries that unite us; for people are more alike than different.

A gala party to close the RWM will follow Dr. Ballon’s performance; the Workman Theatre will be transformed into a Carnivale of the Mind with midway refreshments, buskers, sideshow amusements and flim flam.

Performer’s Bio:
As an award-winning psychiatrist, Dr. Ballon is considered an expert in the area of simulation. He has designed educational initiatives using film, television, the internet, videogames, theatre, magic, mentalism and art. Dr. Ballon has been a consultant to television, plays, and film productions. He has created games dealing with mental health that have garnered him awards from the Games Manufacturers Association and international literary and academic associations. Dr. Bruce Ballon is the Director of Education for SIM-one (Simulation Ontario Network of Excellence) and the Director of the Psychiatry Simulation Innovation (P.S.I.) Centre based at the Mount Sinai Hospital.