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“A truly sui generis work, both moving and intellectually stimulating, which deserves to be seen.” - Variety
Daniel Paul Schreber was a celebrated judge who, in 1893, started to receive messages from God. Spending the next nine years in an asylum, where he was tormented by the belief that God was both communicating with him via a cosmic typewriter and turning him into a woman in order to save the world, Schreber wrote what would become the world's most influential autobiography of madness, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (the subject of a famous retrospective case history by Sigmund Freud).
Shock Head Soul intertwines fascinating documentary interviews, moving dramatic reconstructions and trippy CGI animation to tell Schreber's story. Challenging audiences to thread together their own evolving understanding of mental illness, director Simon Pummell (experimental short Secret Joy of Falling Angels, MIFF 92) has produced a visually exquisite and compelling filmic approximation of psychosis wrapped in a love story.
Unique and imaginative, Shock Head Soul combines cinema, storytelling and psychiatry into a deeply moving portrait of a troubled but remarkable man.
“Pummell's film does an unparalleled job of documenting the unphotographable.” - Sight and Sound
Simon Pummell is a guest of the festival.
D Simon Pummell P Janine Marmot, Femke Wolting, Bruno Felix S Simon Pummell, Helen Taylor-Robinson WS Autlook Film Sales TD HD Cam/2011