The secret, often shameful history of New Zealand’s psychiatric hospitals is laid bare in Mental Notes, a new feature-length documentary by award-winning filmmaker Jim Marbrook. Screening as part of the upcoming World Cinema Showcase, Mental Notes is a “gently affirmative” film, according to Bill Gosden, the festival’s director.
Featuring the testimony of five survivors of the “very bad old days of mental health care in New Zealand”, it “honours their endurance and enables their stories to emerge from the shadows and leave their indelible blemishes on our social history,” says Gosden.
In a Radio New Zealand Interview Graeme Tuckett said about the film: "Mental Notes is just hands-down one of the half-dozen better New Zealand documentaries I’ve seen in the last decade." It will begin its theatrical run in late June 2012.