The Parapraxis Film Festival

Light Industry
Friday, September 19 - Thursday, September 25, 2025
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn

Organized by Perwana Nazif and Hannah Zeavin

Psychoanalysis and cinema have long been understood as coeval and intimately linked. Long before Alfred Hitchcock hired psychoanalysts to grace the sets of his films, and much before Laura Mulvey brought together Lacanian thought with feminist theory to offer us the “male gaze,” psychoanalysis and cinema shared a birth year, if not a birthplace. These twins continued to impact one another from the very start: the first medical training films were of hysterical patients in Paris, much like neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot had photographed his patients one generation earlier. As scholar Akira Mizuta Lippit notes, the inside of the human subject became a site for scientific contest and exploration by 1895, “with the emergence of three new phenomenologies of the inside: psychoanalysis, X-rays, and cinema. Three techniques or technologies that pursued the scene of interiority, the opening of the mind, the body, and the world.” Indeed, the science of internal conflicts, the science of imaging the internal, and the science of representing movement all appeared (or, more accurately, were consolidated) in that year and began, in no small part owing to cinema, to be disseminated around the world.

Whereas cinema studies has made broad use of psychoanalytic theory, psychoanalytic communities in the United States have oft ignored their own rich cinematic history. Yet the cinematographer has long been at the clinic. The Parapraxis Film Festival brings together a broad, powerful set of scientific and experimental films that take up the complex history of psychoanalysis globally—from Algeria to India, from Lebanon to the United States—and across its many forms, in the street and the asylum, practiced with children and with groups. It is our hope that screening dozens of representations of psychoanalysis’s past—by clinicians as famous as Fanon, and by anonymized patients—better allows us to envision a psychoanalysis for the 21st century, one that we deserve and are collectively bringing into being.

Ticketing

A limited number of passes for the festival, guaranteeing admission to all screenings, are available for sale here.

All other tickets will be pay-what-you-can ($10 suggested donation) and available at the door, first-come, first-served. If any seats reserved for passholders are still empty at the screening’s scheduled start time, they will be made available to those in the standby line. Box office opens 30 minutes prior to showtime. No entry 10 minutes after start of show. Please note: seating is limited.

Program

Friday, September 19th

7pm
At Home with Freud
Introduced by Hannah Zeavin

Dogs, parties, grandchildren, foraged mushrooms. Austria, Germany, France, London. Across the 1930s, at least eight films were made of Sigmund Freud, his family, and his followers. From the placid waters of the Liezen District, to Freud’s eventual escape from the Nazis as aided by Princess Marie Bonaparte, these short films provide a unique glimpse into the father of psychoanalysis in the final decade of his life, of psychoanalysis in its second generation, and of Europe as Nazification took hold.

[Sigmund Freud visits Simmel in Tegel—home movies]
[Sigmund Freud—home movies]
[Sigmund Freud and Anna and grandchildren in Grundlsee, 1930—home movies]
[Sigmund Freud at Grundlsee, Austria and Pötzleinsdorf, Vienna, Austria—home movies]
[Pötzleinsdorf, July 1932, Professor, with Prof. Löwy—Sigmund Freud—home movies], filmed by Mark Brunswick
[Sigmund Freud, original film—home movies. No. 2]
[La Bergasse, Vienna, hiver 1937—Sigmund Freud—home movies], filmed by Marie Bonaparte
[Le Professeur Freud de Vienne à Londres par Paris—Sigmund Freud—home movies], filmed by Marie Bonaparte
[Home movies from Freud Archives, 1938-1939—Sigmund Freud—home movies], filmed by Marie Bonaparte
[Home movies from Freud Archives, 1939—Sigmund Freud—home movies], filmed by Marie Bonaparte

Live narration provided by Zeavin.

Total running time: 48 mins

Special thanks to the Library of Congress and the Freud Archive.

Saturday, September 20

Experiments in Film and the Clinic: Institutional Psychotherapy as Mess around-iatry

4pm
Part A: Filmmaker and Doctor Collaborations
Discussion with by Stefania Pandolfo

Regards sur la folie / La fête prisonnière (A Look at Madness / Captive Feast), Mario Ruspoli with Francesc Tosquelles, 1962, 53 mins

A collaboration between the prince of cinéma vérité Mario Ruspoli and Catalan militant psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles culminated in 40 hours of footage, from which three documentaries were produced. The latter two were made at the suggestion of Tosquelles inviting Ruspoli into the Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital where he practiced the Marxist-Lacanian-inflected Institutional Psychotherapy. A Look at Madness depicts everyday life at the hospital, from the daily meetings between staff and patients to various workshops, and continues into Captive Feast, where the annual party put on by the patients is attended both by hospital residents and neighboring villagers. The festivities include dancing, a game where players can knock the hat off a Dr. Tosquelles-look-alike (with as much fury and desire as they please), and a “bull fight”; among them we see distanced figures, one smoking in solitude, far from the camera like in the film prior. In a group, a man asserts the walls that surround them: “It’s a prison party since it’s taking place in a prison.”

El-Baab (The Door), Moncef Letayef with Essedik Jeddi, 1980, 26 mins

El-Baab was made after an elderly patient at the Razi psychiatric hospital in La Manouba, Tunis expressed a concern: the feeling of this open hospital, following in the practices of institutional psychotherapy, would come to an end once Dr. Essedik Jeddi left the institution, as had been the case when Dr. Frantz Fanon had left the same ward in the early 1960s. Dr. Jeddi, with filmmaker Moncef Letayef, and in collaboration with the patients and healthcare staff of La Manouba, decided to make a hybrid docufiction film in October 1980 around this desire for openness. The film re-actualizes a session in March 1977 where a group of patients, former patients, and staff expressed their associations, fears, desires, and so forth towards doors as thresholds and barriers. The group kept nearly all doors open in the hospital and removed the doors that led to isolation cells. The project depicts various symbolic and material thresholds across several art and music workshops at the hospital, while also considering the practice of extending the liminal into a work of art, as in the collective production of the film itself.

“This film is therefore intended as a memorandum of a historical period of the Ibn Rochd-Pinel Unit of the Razi hospital in Tunisia, in which the patients were given the opportunity to join all the caregivers among the medical and paramedical staff, as co-authors of this work. We thank Tunisian Television for contributing to the production of this film.” - Dr. Essedik Jeddi

7pm
Part B: François Pain and La Borde
Discussion with Chris Kraus and Anahid Nersessian

François Tosquelles: une politique de la folie (François Tosquelles: A Politics of Madness), François Pain with Danielle Sivadon and Jean-Claude Polack, 1989, 54 mins

In the late 1980s, François Pain, Danielle Sivadon, and Jean-Claude Polack embarked on a two-day interview with Institutional Psychotherapy’s founding figure Francesc Tosquelles. Their project would also include films with other major figures of Institutional Psychotherapy, such as Jean Oury (founder of Institutional Psychotherapeutic clinic La Borde) and Félix Guattari. Behind the camera was Pain, the leading filmmaker documenting the histories of institutional psychotherapy. He worked at La Borde clinic from 1965 to 1972 and was Tosquelles’s analysand. Well-known for his work in guerilla media networks and leftist collective organizing, Pain was co-founder of pirate station Radio Tomate with Guattari, and one of the first French filmmakers to use handheld video technologies.

The film overviews Tosquelles’s life’s work—from organizing working-class movements against fascism to his experimental clinical practice—through conversation and archival footage. Cheeky trickster that he is, and putting into question all he has recounted on camera, Tosquelles reminds his interviewers and viewers that psychoanalysis is characterized by the requirement to invent, to the point where he calls his practice of psychiatry as déconniatrie, or “mess around-iatry.” The patient messes around, the analyst, like Tosquelles, messes around and, after a belly full of this, perhaps, “a little interpretation.”

Min Tanaka à La Borde (Min Tanaka at La Borde), François Pain, 1986, 24 mins

Japanese butô dancer Min Tanaka performs at La Borde for its residents and staff. The film includes a discussion with the audience on the performance and the collective unconscious. Among the residents, one can spot actor Pierre Clémenti. Decades later, Pain would make a follow-up film in Tokyo, with Min reflecting on the performance and the residents’ musings.

Sunday, September 21

1pm
Patient Perspectives
Discussion with Chloe Murtagh and Jesse Newberg

La vague de cristal (The Crystal Wave), François Pain, 1988, 19 mins

A film based on experimental educator and writer Fernand Deligny’s short story “La vague de cristal,” where a crystal wave is fast encroaching on a village and threatens to freeze everyone and everything in its path. Deligny, who had briefly worked at La Borde and left in haste, was a close friend of Pain’s. The film was presented at an annual gathering of various hospital clubs after Pain was asked to organize a video workshop with patients. The film takes place at La Borde, with bearers of crystal tidings running around (some on horseback, others up spiral staircases) and warning others of the imminent crystal wave. The solutions for the wave that will fix all in its wake? “Pose for posterity’s sake.”

Les dents du singe (The Monkey’s Teeth), René Laloux, 1960, 14 mins

One of the first films produced at La Borde, the production includes documentary footage and an animation made by patients. The film opens onto La Borde’s forested landscape, with a few shots of a young Félix Guattari smoking pensively. In the animation, a wicked dentist steals teeth from his anesthetized patients to sell off to his wealthy clients. That is, until a monkey on a bicycle saves the day.

goodnight mommy, goodnight daddy, Klein, 2025, 5 mins

A music video by experimental musician and conceptual artist Klein. Strobe lights illuminate a darkened waiting room as patients wait seemingly forever in this liminal space. Only chairs and office furniture the color of blues remain as the door finally opens.

Looking at You Looking at Me, Max Bowens, 2025, 37 mins

An inquiry into lineages of clinical, scientific, and documentary media, Looking at You Looking at Me follows a mother and her autistic son as they attempt a reciprocity that is not determined by verbal communication and language. Following three years of recording and thirty years of accumulated archival footage, the film explores this attempt towards an encounter via experimental and expansive non-systems of neurodiverse networks and aesthetics—through image, sound, tracings and gesture.

4pm
Fernand Deligny: For Asylum
Introduced by Perwana Nazif and Anya Komar
Discussion with Sandra Alvarez de Toledo

Ce gamin, là (That Kid, There), Renaud Victor with Fernand Deligny, 1975, 96 mins

After seeing Fernand Deligny’s film Le Moindre Geste (1964-71), 25-year-old Renaud Victor—a self-taught filmmaker, Maoist, and part-time plumber—wrote to Deligny and visited him in the rocky chaos of Monoblet, a village in the rural Cévennes mountains of southern France. He wanted to make a film about what had developed there: an informal care network in which nonverbal autistic children temporarily stayed (except for the few instances of permanent stays) alongside a team of unpaid nonprofessionals, who were often young people from working-class backgrounds, which he called “close presences.”

Deligny, a major interlocutor for Chris Marker, André Bazin, Robert Kramer, and François Truffaut (to name a few), set the conditions for Victor—he was to live among the network, which he did for three years. And much like the network itself, and Deligny’s writings, Ce gamin, là was collectively authored, rejecting the idea of a film subject or object, opting instead for sequences of gesture, visual spatialization, poetics, and abstractions. Like the autonomous living areas of the networks, also called “rafts on the mountain”, Deligny attempted a filming (or, rather, what he called “camera-ing”) that “said nothing,” “wrote nothing,” and “emitted nothing.” As Deligny states in the movie: “language disappeared as one may say of the sun.” The subject sets, and a clearing emerges where we are open to the possibility of other modes of collective autistic existence; a cleavage possible only in the effacement of subject itself, and the possibility of the existence of ce gamin, là, That kid, there.

Monday, September 22

7pm
Speculative Bion
Discussion with hannah baer

A Memoir of the Future, Kumar Shahani (director, co-writer) and Meg Harris Williams (co-writer), 1983, 42 mins

In 1979, Wilfred Bion prepared to return to India for the first time since boyhood at the invitation of Udayan Patel (a young psychoanalyst in Mumbai) and his close friend Kumar Shahani, who proposed to make a documentary about his early life. Bion agreed but before he could do so he fell ill with leukemia and died. Instead, Shahani became interested in the idea of a film based on Bion’s fantasy autobiography, A Memoir of the Future, and went to London to enquire about funding. (Bion had been president of the British Psychoanalytical Society until he moved to California in 1968.) The Melanie Klein Trust refused, but psychoanalysts Donald Meltzer and Martha Harris of The Roland Harris Educational Trust, which had published the Memoir, agreed to fund part of it, in conjunction with business contacts of Udayan Patel in Mumbai. The Trust facilitated the filming in Delhi in the winter of 1983, where all the existing scenes were shot. Two car accidents, deaths, withdrawal of Indian funding, and the rise of Thatcherism all obstructed any further filming of the project, so the work was never finished. We present the rushes here, edited by Meg Harris Williams.

More information about the production may be found online, and in Harris Williams’s The Becoming Room: Filming Bion’s A Memoir of the Future.

Screening materials courtesy the Harris Meltzer Trust.

Tuesday, September 23

7pm
Italian Democratic Psychiatry
Discussion with Angela Dalle Vacche

Films made by the patients of the Psychiatric Hospital of Trieste, 1973

This collection of films was made by patients at the Psychiatric Hospital of Trieste in the early 1970s where revolutionary Italian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia worked. The workshop was led by Andrea Piccardo, who continued the legacy of Studio di Monte Olimpino, a research laboratory for cinema founded by Bruno Munari and Andrea’s father, Marcello Piccardo. The Studio was well known for its distinct research and practice in Italy, from cinema made by children to informational films. The children’s cinema, where children became the authors of their own learning (including Andrea Piccardo himself), drove the conception of the workshop at Trieste as a “laboratory of audiovisual realizations and research”. And thus they “threw the hook to Franco Basaglia.” It was, Piccardo explains, “enough for us to confront ourselves with that reality in the making, a madhouse in the beginning, and to understand how to insert our proposal.” They began the three-month-long project by connecting a TV to a camera filming people at random, in an effort to produce a “potential visual circuit,” where they would see each other live on television. The circuit provoked reactions of joyful disbelief towards a possibility of participation in something radically new–a media-inflected language. To those inclined, Piccardo and his collective proposed to meet at Laboratory P, an abandoned hospital ward, where anyone could make a film. A few showed up, some to ask for a cigarette, others to smoke together. Nine of those who came to Laboratory P each made their own film. All “pure cinema,” the films were broadcast on Italian film critic Enrico Ghezzi’s late night Fuori orario TV program, and a select few screened at the Venice Film Festival.

For Andrea Piccardo, the image that lingers from this period is entirely cinematic: “It was summer, and at dusk, in an open space high up in the asylum, an organ was being played. I set up an open-air cinema with screenings of classic films: there was a small awning and the chairs slowly and calmly filled up, and at a certain point the projectionist would start the event. There was still too much light, the sun was still lingering, and you couldn't see anything on the screen, but you could hear the sound; and so that mysterious film unfolded, followed attentively by the crazy spectators in a truly crazy context. Just like the cinema we attempted to create.”

To be screened:

La mia città di Marcello (My City by Marcello), 7 mins
A meditation on memories of places and experiences from the filmmaker’s childhood and coming of age.

Una giornata in montagna di Olindo Guina (A Day in the Mountains by Olindo Guina), 9 mins
An ode to the filmmaker’s passion for mountains.

Il malato di mente e la società di Egidio (The Mentally Ill and Society by Egidio), 8 mins
The film analyzes a situation presented by a patient with a request for change. It includes drawings by the filmmaker.

Lo sparatore di Ennio Fragiacomo (The Shooter by Ennio Fragiacomo), 8 mins
A western version of a story about outcasts.

Ricordi di una delle più vecchie zone triestine di Fulvio Castioni (Memories of One of the Oldest Areas of Trieste by Fulvio Castioni), 28 mins
A documentary on the neighborhood where the filmmaker lives.

Eccoli, Stefano Ricci with Jacopo Quadri, Giacomo Piermatti, and Mami Verlag, 2014, 30 mins

Artist and filmmaker Stefano Ricci was shown a collection of 16mm films shot by Giorgio Osbat at the psychiatric hospital of Gorizia during Franco Basaglia’s time there in the 1960s. A revolutionary psychiatrist, disability rights proponent, and major figure of Italian Democratic Psychiatry, Basaglia’s work was crucial to deinstitutionalization in Italy. The archival footage documents unreleased images of the first music therapy workshops in Gorizia. The sound had been lost, Ricci was told. And thus he commenced an editing of Eccoli with a new score. An homage to Basaglia and his legacy, the closure of mental hospitals, as well as the “madmen” Ricci has met and the filmed people in these archives, Eccoli is, above all, a tribute to the “return of the mad to the community.”

Wednesday, September 24

7pm
Fanon’s Clinic
Discussion with Adam HajYahia

Watching Tosquelles Films, Carles Guerra, 2023-24, 37 mins

Among the fragments of black-and-white 8mm film reels shot in the early 1950s by Francesc Tosquelles is one of the few moving images of Frantz Fanon at Saint-Alban hospital. The cigarette in his hand smolders across the frame as he looks at the person across from him, who may be psychiatrist Georges Daumézon. Carles Guerra’s assemblage includes a total of five reels shot by Tosquelles between 1953 and 1967, in black and white and color. Tosquelles shot these images with his 8mm Paillard camera, purchased after a car accident. Major characters of institutional psychotherapy, such as a youthful Jean Oury and Daumézon, occupy the frame, as do the wives of many of these doctors. The color reel includes images from a trip to Venezuela and a sojourn in Mexico. Guerra fills the silences of the reels with intertitles that attempt to read the images.

The Whispering of Ghosts, Mohamed Bourouissa, 2018, 13 mins

The Whispering of Ghosts concerns revolutionary psychiatrist, philosopher, and militant Frantz Fanon’s tenure at the Blida Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Blida, Algeria from 1953 to 1956. Bourouissa, who was born in Blida, interviews Fanon’s former patient, Bourlem Mohamed, who gardens as a form of occupational therapy. The two discuss exile, colonialism, illness, and torture while planning a garden together. As Carlos Basualdo has remarked, “This is a composite image, an arrangement of irreconcilable fragments, the fissures between them made even deeper by the episodic appearances of the inimitable voice of Franz Franon, heavy with a Caribbean accent, describing the psychological damage that domination inescapably inflicts to the colonial subject.”

The People’s Detox, Jenna Bliss, 2019, 57 mins

In November 1970, the Young Lords, alongside revolutionary health organizations and local heroin addicts, occupied Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx for the second time. Lincoln Hospital, as writer Cosmo Bjorkenheim notes, was “known in the period’s local parlance as the ‘butcher shop’...a tragically underfunded public hospital that had already been the site of several struggles for local autonomy and decolonized treatment modalities for the communities it was meant to serve.” Bliss’s film, a mix of newsreel footage and interviews, acknowledges the legacy of Frantz Fanon’s radical clinical and political work in the Young Lords’s efforts. The takeover of Lincoln Hospital involved an economic, political, and social analysis of faulty and targeted drug “detoxification” treatments as well as the influx of drugs into working-class and poor communities of color. This coup was also a clinical coup: acupuncture replacing pharmaceutical treatment for addiction and recovery.

Thursday, September 25

7pm
Remember to Play: Children, Psychiatry, and War
Discussion with Lama Khouri

Les enfants de la guerre (Children of War), Jocelyne Saab, 1976, 11 mins

In 1976, after the broadcast of her film Les enfants de la guerre, Saab said, “I was sentenced to death as a traitor to my community. I was hunted down and I'll never forget that scene. I'd made the film and it was shown on France 2, on the news, so it was a prime time slot. That same day, while I was in Beirut, I passed by Hamra Street, the street we used to call the Champs-Élysées, near the Horse Shoe, the intellectuals' café, and there the newsagents were displaying newspapers on little cardboard boxes, and I saw the front page: ‘Condemn Jocelyne Saab,’ ‘Judge Jocelyne Saab.’ In the illustration, I had an eye patch and a prostitute's head. I was scared and I understood the war at that moment. I went up the whole street and bought maybe fifty copies of the newspaper, as if I wanted to be on the safe side. I read and reread that insulting, abusive, intolerant article.”

Prolific Lebanese filmmaker and reporter Jocelyn Saab is known for films that are often shot in conflict zones, amid war and political upheaval’s aftermath, catastrophe’s ruins. Her footage of the Lebanese Civil War returns again and again, haunting the poetic images and words that grace her films. Les enfants de la guerre was shot in the predominantly Muslim and Palestinian shantytown of Karantina in Beirut following a massacre by far-right Christian militias. Saab, born to a Lebanese-Maronite family, was sentenced as a traitor in her community. The strength of her films, as Etel Adnan wrote, and “her freedom of thought and behavior has sometimes cost her dearly and even put her life in danger.” Refusing to film the massacre, Saab returned days later to film the children who survived, following them with her camera as they reenact scenes of war with toys, games, and drawings. The film, as Saab herself described it, denounced violence and war. “Few other people,” Adnan continues, “have suffered so much to preserve their self-esteem and survive in a meaningful way in a world as hostile and indifferent as ours.”

J’ai huit ans (I Am Eight Years Old), Olga Baïdar-Poliakoff and Yann Le Masson with René Vautier and Frantz Fanon, 1961, 8 mins

Cinema, for Olga Baïdar-Poliakoff and Yann Le Masson, was a question of “fighting cinematically.” J’ai huit ans was the couple’s first militant film based on an idea by French anti-colonial filmmaker René Vautier (whose films were often censored and who had been imprisoned for his work). The film primarily documents drawings by Algerian children in a refugee camp, many of which depict French soldiers’s violence and massacres of the children’s families and the daily brutality of colonial rule in Algeria. The film was seized 17 times and only granted authorization to legally screen 12 years after the Algerian War. As Le Masson notes, “The first screening took place in Paris on February 10, 1962, with no precautions, no authorization, and no pretenses, for around fifty people. On the same day, exclusive theaters were showing Jules et Jim, Don Camillo: Monsignor, Vie privée, Adorable menteuse, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and Pocketful of Miracles. The day before, it was Charonne [massacre where nine members of the CGT trade union were killed by the police while demonstrating against the Algerian war]. Sponsored by the Maurice Audin Committee, the film then circulated clandestinely throughout France, by the dozens.”

The first set of these drawings are purported to be from Fanon’s art-therapeutic work with kids in a refugee camp in Tunisia, where he encouraged the Algerian children to illustrate their experiences of the war (drawing from his work with the Ceméa community of children near Blida, Algeria). Fanon and Vautier had been in talks about a project together that was never realized. These drawings and interviews, while not attributed to Fanon, are also in a book published by Italian publisher Pirelli and later in France by Maspero. A second set of drawings were collected by Baïdar-Poliakoff at the Algerian-Tunisian border, and the live-action images of the film were shot in Tunisia by Vautier and Le Masson. The film, for Le Masson, was to “take the viewer into the traumatized world of these kids, making the word ‘France’ rhyme atrociously with the words ‘to kill,’ ‘to burn,’ or ‘to torture.’”

Darkroom, Asli Baykal, 2023, 14 mins

Children run around with cameras in the neighborhood of Istasyon in Asli Baykal’s experimental Darkroom. Shot on 16mm, the film follows the children attending Sirkhane Darkroom, a traveling analog photography workshop and program for displaced children living in the borders between Turkey and Syria.

La caméra bigle, Martin Molina and Marina Vidal-Naquet, 2021, 42 mins

In 1968, Fernand Deligny left the clinic of La Borde for the Cévennes, where he began an informal network welcoming nonverbal autistic children. It is here in the Cévennes that he starts to send Super 8 images to the parents of the children in the network, to reveal the living conditions and environment of their community. Meanwhile, his conception and practice of the cross-eyed camera, or camera-ing (short for camering as opposed to filming), continues to develop as the camering of lost images, of the slightest image, and the image that begs a different point of seeing outside of the “self.” Molina and Vidal-Naquet rework these images, archiving Deligny’s common into a montage that emphasizes the gestures, often lyrical and always immutable, infinite and infinitive, of the network. “There remains what is not perceived,” writes Deligny, “this remaining part being tacit, which is why it’s not said. Would this be image? It could be. I can’t say it any better.”

Program notes by Nazif and Zeavin.

All works projected digitally.

Co-sponsored by the Psychosocial Foundation and The Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis.