By Marcia Lee
The ISEPP 2011 Conference included screening of Crooked Beauty by director Ken Paul Rosenthal.
“Crooked Beauty is a poetic documentary that chronicles artist-activist Jacks McNamara’s transformative journey from childhood abuse to psych ward inpatient to pioneering mental health advocacy. It is an intimate portrait of her intense personal quest to live with courage and dignity, and a powerful critique of standard psychiatric treatments. Poignant testimonials connect the fissures and fault lines of human nature to the unstable topography and mercurial weather patterns of the San Francisco Bay Area. Crooked Beauty reshapes mental health stigmas through a new healing culture and political model for living with madness as a tool of creativity, inspiration and hope.”
Crooked Beauty is a poetic documentary that chronicles artist-activist Jacks McNamara’s transformative journey from childhood abuse to psych ward patient to pioneering mental health advocacy. Jacks is the co-founder of The Icarus Project⌃, a radical mental health support network and media project by and for people living with the dangerous gifts that our society commonly labels as “mental illness”.
It is an intimate portrait of her intense personal quest to live with courage and dignity, and a powerful critique of standard psychiatric treatments. Poignant testimonials connect the fissures and fault lines of human nature to the unstable topography and mercurial weather patterns of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Crooked Beauty reshapes mental health stigmas through a new healing culture and political model for living with madness as a tool of creativity, inspiration and hope. www.crookedbeauty.com
This is brilliant and poetic; but I don’t see the “Madness” at all. I see someone being led by their creative Right-brain and being called, “Mad.”
Let’s drop that label off a cliff into the sea and get into the brightness and joy that comes from Creativeness and balance the pain and oppression we see, know and live in.
Ken Paul Rosenthal’s film “Crooked Beauty” is a jewel. The film is lyrical, gentle, painful, touching, real, artistic, soaring, indicting, and hopefully not apocalyptic. I was expecting a dreadful, dark, agonizing history of madness. Instead I watched the birth and transformation of the human soul at its most vulnerable and most inspiring. It is the clearest indictment of the myth of mental illness and a clarion call to honor the basic evolution that every human soul goes through on earth in all its pain and beauty. Rosenthal’s images are captivating and deeply moving. Watching and listening to Jacks Ashley McNamara is like seeing the talent of a Georgia O’Keefe being born and developing before the artist becomes famous. Our madness and our creativity walk hand in hand. Out of the knife edges of life something beautiful and transcendent is born. We need to support the honest voice of pain, rage, and love in each other, not try to medicate ourselves into silence. Send this film to the Sundance Festival, Ken. You will blow them away!
Marcia Lee, Solutions Without Drugs