I Send You This Place

(2012)

I Send You This Place

Feature-Length Documentary (2012)
Story, Written, and Research by Andrea Sisson
Directed, Produced, and Edited by Andrea Sisson & Pete Ohs.
Performance by Andrea Sisson. Camera by Pete Ohs.
All music instrumentation, composition, and arrangement by Andrea Sisson & Pete Ohs.
Filmed between 2010-2012 in Reykjavik, Iceland

Funded and Supported by the U.S. Fulbright Foundation
World Premiere 2012 FULL FRAME DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL
International Premiere 2012 REYKJAVIK INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Special Feature 2013 VAEFF @ TRIBECA CINEMAS NYC

Filmmaker Magazine - Five Questions with I Send You This Place Directors Peter Ohs and Andrea Sisson
New York Times Review
Filmmaker Magazine - I Feel Purple TodayQ&A at Tribeca Cinemas

This film has now been made public by the filmmakers.

Stream now

Can something as natural as the weather be deemed mentally ill?

“This feature-length, experimental documentary blends fiction and non-fiction to tell the story of a young American filmmaker whose encounter with the intense natural beauty of Iceland inspires her to examine her comfortable notions of sanity and insanity, and to explore mental illness and family bonds through Iceland’s otherworldly terrain. Part memoir, travelogue, and personal essay, the film tells the story of a wanderlust that sparks an unexpected spiritual exploration - in a place where glaciers are more common than billboards, where inhabitants are known to speak to mountains, where summers bring twenty four hours of daylight, and winters bring twenty four hours of darkness. “Delusional” thought and “erratic” behavior seem not so different from Andrea’s untamed surroundings in which the wind rants, the clouds are grandiose, and the seasons bi-polar. The artists’ personal reckonings lead her to embrace her own eccentricities, namely, her ADD diagnosis which she comes to view as a gift, not a curse. Led by co-documentarian, Pete’s probing questions, Andrea arrives at fresh and startling insights and through the personal tool of documentation presents the island itself as a new model for looking at mental health.”

- Ted Mott, Full Frame Film Festival

  • I Send You This Place emerged from a 2010–11 Fulbright Fellowship in Iceland and from an attempt by a sister to make sense of her brother's experience of schizophrenia. Rather than explaining or diagnosing mental illness, the film approaches it through a free-associative process, allowing symbolic logic, landscape, memory, performance, and observation to guide its form. The film was made as an attempt to communicate on a symbolic register that the director’s brother could recognize; a way of meeting rather than interpreting his experience. Developed through documentation, wandering, and sustained curiosity, the work became a way of thinking with cinema rather than simply using cinema to represent an idea.

    The film explores grief, perception, and the lived experience of loving someone whose relationship to reality challenges conventional assumptions about sanity, knowledge, and care. Set against Iceland's extraordinary landscape, I Send You This Place uses place itself as a formal structure through which to investigate mental health, subjectivity, and the ways psychiatric systems shape our understanding of difference. Rather than asking what schizophrenia is, the film asks what becomes visible when symbolic thought, perception, and lived experience are taken seriously on their own terms.

    Materially, the film combines poetic documentary, performance, drawing and tracing, narration, and research and is a hybrid form of fiction and nonfiction. Looking back, director Sisson now understands the project as the beginning of an ongoing investigation into documentary as a practice of listening and one guided less by explanation than by creating the conditions through which meaning can emerge.

    Filmed between 2010–2012 in Reykjavík, Iceland, and Cincinnati, Ohio.

    Thank you to the U.S. Fulbright Foundation, the Icelandic Fulbright Office, and the 2010 Fulbright cohort in Reykjavík, Iceland.

    For our families, and for Jake Sisson.

OFFICIAL TRAILER

Multichannel Installation in chapters | The Emery Gallery | Cincinnati, Ohio, 2013

 

Official Motion Picture Soundtrack