In 2018, my career took a remarkable turn. In nearly twenty years as a television commercials director, I felt for the first time a profound connection to the topic of which I was about to make a film.

That topic was mental health.

And the film, a social experiment video for the 2018 ‘Beyond The Label’ mental health anti-stigma campaign by the National Council of Social Service, began my three-year journey making films about mental health, culminating in this ‘PhotoStory: From Darkness to Light’ video series.

This video series could have been a very straightforward documentary of the PhotoStory project. But with the pandemic taking a turn for the worse soon after the start of the project, PhotoStory and the circuit breaker became unequivocally intertwined. It became apparent to me that there was potential for a bigger narrative.

It wasn’t just a video about a photography project anymore; it was about how the circuit breaker had affected the peers and how they persevered in these challenges.

With the ‘PhotoStory’ project coinciding with the unexpected announcement of the COVID-19 circuit breaker in May 2020, it was an opportunity for this filmmaker to structure the series as three episodes that are a chronological parallel to the pre-, during, and post- circuit breaker time frame.

And so, what was meant to be just one video became three, in a chronological parallel to the pre-, during, and post-circuit breaker time frame. To further interweave the themes of photography and mental health, the episodes are titled after photography concepts—‘Finding’ an angle, ‘Focusing’ on a subject, and ‘Framing’ the shot—chosen specifically as metaphors for the mental and emotional processes every peer had experienced in the course of the project and the lockdown.

In the Zoom sessions where I observed the peers and listened to their stories, two words came to mind—‘patience’ and ‘fortitude.’ To me, all the peers displayed these two values knowingly or not.

The patience to hunker down and wait out the storm, the patience with oneself in recovery.

The fortitude to stay strong in the face of adversity, the fortitude to be steadfast when confronted with stigma.

Hence I weaved ‘patience’ and ‘fortitude’ into the narrative as an underlying theme because I felt they were tenets essential to navigating the pandemic and to one’s journey of recovery from a mental health condition.

I hope that viewers will understand and appreciate how much all the peers have had to go through during these difficult times, even as they attempted to explore a new way of self-expression. I also hope that this video series can be a snapshot of what has irrevocably been an epoch for all of us.

Language

GENRES

GENRES

TOPICS

TOPICS

What's New

Most Popular

Channels

Series

Originals

Community

Patron

Studios