The screening will be followed by a Q&A and panel discussion with filmmakers Devorah Baum and Josh Appignanesi and psychoanalysts Francesca Joseph and Douglas Gill
Westminster Quakers, 52 St Martin’s Lane Covent Garden London WC2N 4EA
£8 Site members and trainees
Praise for the film
‘Genre-defying Freudian docudrama … I couldn’t take my eyes off it’ – Josh Glancy, Sunday Times
‘Complex, subtle … A rich new seam of autofictional docucomedy’ – Peter Brdshaw, The Guardian
‘Pointed, self-reflective critique of a modern marriage. Peppered with insight’ – Ben Nicholson, Sight & Sound
Devorah Baum is an author, academic and filmmaker whose topics include emotions, comedy and religion. Her book Feeling Jewish interrogates the way feelings frequently labelled quintessentially Jewish – guilt, self-hatred, paranoia, anxiety – emerged from specific historical conditions of deracination and marginalisation. She demonstrates how these have now, in the era of globalised hypermediation, become more common to us all, as have their vexed feelings. Her widely acclaimed writing has appeared in The NYT, The Guardian, Granta, and the FT. She has spoken at numerous festivals, events and conferences, and on TV and radio. She is Associate Professor at Southampton University.
Josh Appignanesi is Devorah Baum’s husband. Trained in anthropology, he is a writer/director whose work spans documentary, fiction and the space in between. His debut feature, the religious melodrama Song of Songs, won awards at London and Edinburgh, and was BIFA-nominated. He went on to make the David Baddiel-scripted religious satire The Infidel (In competition Tribeca, Turin). His last film, the Jacqui Davies-produced Female Human Animal (Sheffield Doc/Fest) is a hybrid docufictional psychothriller set in the real life art-world, featuring surrealist Leonora Carrington and the Mexican novelist Chloe Aridjis.
Francesca Joseph is a psychoanalyst and a member of the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Her previous career was as a writer and director in film and television, where she won many awards. Her first feature film, Tomorrow La Scala! premiered in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival, and she is known for having created a new genre – the documentary soap – with her series Driving School. This year the Grierson Trust cited Driving School as one of the 50 most influential documentaries of all time.
Douglas Gill is originally an artist and art therapist and co-founder of Studio Upstairs; a charity and therapeutic arts community in London and Bristol. He trained as a psychoanalyst with the Philadelphia Association and works in private practice in London. Doug is a member of the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis
This is one of the Site’s ‘Occasional Events’ featuring talks with contemporary artists and their work. Whilst the arts and psychoanalytic practices tend to remain distinct, the creative potential between them is infinite. This series is aimed at exploring what contemporary artists have to offer psychoanalytic thinking.