Artist in Person

The dividing line between madness and sanity and the actual distance between those deemed mad and sane have varied over time. Shot in a documentary style, Threads of Belonging reconsiders the 1960s radical anti-psychiatry movement of R. D. Laing and others in a film project that is radical in itself. From her own community in Milwaukee, filmmaker Montgomery brought together a cast and crew to reenact an experiment in which doctors and schizophrenic patients lived together to explore alternative therapies for the mentally ill. The cast, who resided together for the length of the filming, used case histories to improvise the majority of their interactions. The film explores what constitutes a community and the idea of mental illness as a journey or process, with healing as the final result. As patients variously integrate into the experimental household, tensions arise around the distinctions between patient and doctor, and around the question of focusing one's efforts within the community as opposed to the larger society.