(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
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“Sometimes when I'm in bed listening to music, it feels like I've been strapping around my legs, even though I haven't. The last time I lay in belts, I got three syringes to calm myself down. They tightened their belts and then went out of the room. "
The boy who turns to the camera, conveys loneliness and apathy. The mouth part – the way he chews the words together with his gaze – reveals suffering and uncertainty about himself and his reception.
The sentences hang in a damp silence. We are not in a closed ward, but are instead witnessing a theater scene. Actor debutant Edvin Anstendsrud portrays the patient disturbingly well, almost for good: Has the powerlessness become too set? For many, it has just that.
The patients constitute one a common but helpless front against an individual-hostile system where profitability is the focus.
This is one of the key warnings in this peculiar documentary, which debates aspects of the psychiatric system is a burden for both patients and their relatives.
From one relatives' perspective
Ugelstad's brother has been in psychiatry for many years. The director uses the film format to convey his encounter with this system, but also to get it talking. Making Sense Together is her third in the series on the topic. Previous works are Indian Summer (2011) – a close, documentary portrait of the brother on his own terms. In the fiction card movie The meeting room (2017), the director rigorously stages the dysfunctional responsibility group for the psychiatric patient.
In the hybrid documentary Making Sense Together – hybrid because it alternates between fiction and facts – are captions from the short film version The meeting room mixed with new material such as archive recordings, text posters, new staging and interviews with real and fictitious people. Yes, there is a lot going on in Ugelstad's latest film, and it is easy to get confused when trying to separate fiction from facts, actors from real personas.
At the distribution company Arthaus' summer party in June, I find the director premiere happy on the dance floor and take her aside to ask her about the film. Ugelstad has two key actors in the film by his side, bipolar Superstar – who participates in the film as himself, and who this evening performs his eminent music – together with actor star Edvin Anstendsrud.
The old jersey mentality is never far away.
How do I reverently circle the conversation on Making Sense Togethers structure, which has so clearly disoriented more than me? Why this extended version reaches the short film The meeting room was such a poignant and sore view of psychiatry and its supporters?
Ugelstad tells me that this longer hybrid film was her original project, which she was recommended to launch a clip from along the way in the making process. The meeting room was this clip, which reaped the script award og was presented at both the Autumn Exhibition and the Oslo Pix film festival. Ugelstad points out that she, as a relative, is in a perpetual meeting room situation. That's why she wanted to extend this fixation part throughout the feature film, by cutting it up with new footage.
Mixed impressions
But how has the success affected the long project? Ugelstad says that the launch of The meeting room made more people contact and that the material for the feature film was thus enriched. The cacophony of expressions echoes the frustration and the lack orienteringone the patients (and relatives) so clearly experience.
Archival material of the old, archetypal kind is used to illustrate the patient role and relationships within the system. Engaged, the director says that these are intended as poetic metaphors; the old straitjacket mentality is never far away.
What is spoken orally in the film hits – but does not touch as strongly as the images of the young patient, standing there watching a pond in the woods, or waiting for a subway platform. Although both cuts suggest something suicidal, they also radiate tranquility. So does the scenes where the protagonist travels and the world passes by outside the window, a world he is separated from where he is on the inside of the glass. The insulation within the invisible "wall", without being able to come out on the other side, is the strongest impression I have left at the end of the film.
More than one diagnosis
In the fictional part, the characters are on a theater stage or in a make – up room. Everyone is cut across the same read – no one takes care of the patient's best, except the mother. In the documentary part, filmed against a background of abstract painting, we meet real people. Together, they form a common but helpless front against an anti-individual system where profitability is in focus, and which counteracts the patient's opportunity for improvement and being a person with accepted feelings and resources.
Ugelstad has got the sense to use movie to Be heard and demand change.
Duality healthy / ill becomes problematic, where the term recovered introduced by the musician Bipolar Superstar. He calls for more curiosity about who the patient is beyond his diagnosis. He translates his experience from psychiatry into free-spirited rap that harasses the system. Elements such as his biting rap commentary seem liberating in a film that largely reveals dangerous mistreatment. With seductive, associative lyrics, he exclaims about pharmaceutical corruption with his resounding voice, while medical titles are playfully transformed into tropical, sweaty love encounters and noisy raw hard rock. Never before has such a theme been as entertaining as in these excerpts.
With the tedious hybrid form, Ugelstad has made many full strides. With a more structured direction, these beads could soon have been sacrificed to get a more streamlined film with a clearer direction.
Ugelstad has obviously gained a sense of using film to be heard and demand change. This film activism is having a much bigger impact now that Making Sense Together gets cinema premiere with subsequent panel discussion.
