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I Send You This Place (2012)

Experimental Documentary; Feature-Length

The feature-length hybrid-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. A piece that sought to both 1) question the medical perspective on schizophrenia, and 2) communicate and connect with my own sibling who lives with psychosis (though symbol and sound- perhaps a language more aligned with his own).

This film has now been made public for free by the filmmakers *WATCH HERE
New York Times Review

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

Directed, Produced, Shot, & Edited in collaboration between Andrea Sisson & Pete Ohs. Story & 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 & Cincinnati, Ohio
For our families, and for Jake Sisson.

This film, questions this by simply asking “Can something as natural as the weather be deemed mentally ill?” The island’s intensity reminds Andrea of her brother Jacob who experiences schizophrenia, a young man who isn’t bound by conventional standards. 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

A document of place and time, the film uses a free-associative process and symbolism led by a desire to connect. The film depicts a family member working through the moments after a loved experiences psychosis. The piece explores perceptions of mental illness and psychosis along with a sister’s (Sisson’s) experience of the grief and personal reckonings that often accompany a diagnosis. The film explores the mindspace of the moment - Andrea confronted with the choice of acceptance or denial, coupled with scrutiny of the system itself, as well as curiously exploring the experience of schizophrenia itself. What is schizophrenia beyond its diagnosis? Is it a human experience, even psychosis, one could learn to embrace? Even celebrate? It is a film depicting the struggle and isolation in this process, through a personal narrative film. The film compares the natural environment of Iceland to the ‘nature’ of the human being (specifically that of the mind affected by schizophrenia and other serious mental illness) and debates the American psychiatric perspective on, and diagnosis of, these illnesses.

<Link to Original Soundtrack>