True Stories: Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival preview

The long-running Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival is back with a wide-ranging programme taking place all over Scotland. All the arts are celebrated, and film is very much in the mix. It’s a great opportunity to see the debut feature from Skinny fave Duncan Cowles. Titled Silent Men, it sees the Edinburgh documentarian take a road trip across the UK to speak with men who’re hiding deep mental health issues behind a stoic façade.

It’s very much about Cowles’s own struggles too, and as you can expect from this talented filmmaker, he tackles these delicate issues with plenty of charm and deadpan humour. Cowles will be touring Silent Men from Glasgow to Inverness via Dumfries, Dundee and Aberfeldy, giving Q&As at each screening, but the majority of SMHAF’s film programme takes place at the CCA in Glasgow as part of its Focus on Film strand. Highlights include three more deeply personal documentaries.

There’s the incisive Sick Girls, in which director Gitti Grüter weaves together the stories of five other women living with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder; Kurtis Watson’s poignant My Dad’s Tapes, which sees the filmmaker try to come to terms with his father’s suicide by exploring the treasure trove of home movies the troubled patriarch left behind; and Chloe Abrahams’ gorgeous and heartbreaking The Taste of Mango, which sees the filmmaker trying to untangle painful knots in her family’s unspoken past. There’s also a host of short film programmes and the festival’s annual International Film Awards, which celebrates the film work that best confronts and reflects on mental health in their programme. 

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Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival, 10-27 Oct, various venues across Scotland; SMHAF’s Focus on Film, 16-19 Oct, CCA, Glasgow
Full programme at mhfestival.com/events/focus-on-film