DOCUMENTARY PROJECTS
To achieve his mission of promoting stigma-free societies on a larger scale, Sean Campbell has partnered with Sheryll Franko, Executive Director of Falling Awake Productions, an award-winning international creative bureau that produces media committed to changing social consciousness on pressing, modern topics. Together, they are collaborating on two documentary film projects that are international in scope, and Sean is fulfilling roles as a writer and producer.
In-progress documentary projects:
How To Touch A Hot Stove
A feature-length film about mental health stigma and the global mental health movement
Two Worlds: One Goal
A short film about youth expression in a rapidly changing Arab world
HOW TO TOUCH A HOT STOVE
A feature-length film about mental health stigma and the global mental health movement
Currently in production
How To Touch A Hot Stove is a feature length, 90-120 minute documentary, narrated by actor John Turturro (Transformers, The Big Lebowski), which seeks to alter the way that people think about mental health. By chronicling the experiences of dynamic individuals who think, feel, or behave differently from societal norms, How To Touch A Hot Stove shows the struggles that people with mental health issues face as a result of stigma, while examining ways to bridge the huge divide between "us" and "them." In doing so, the film speaks to practitioners, consumers, and advocates, as well as to friends and families of those who range from mildly eccentric to those with full-blown psychoses. In exposing a mental health field still trying to find its parameters, the film highlights an emerging global movement to combat stigma and support those experiencing differences in their thinking, feeling, and perception.
Despite significant advances in medicine, psychiatry, social work, and psychotherapy, a deeply embedded stigma prevails. Indeed, millions of people across the world struggle with negotiating who they are and how they can fit into society in the face of the stigma that confronts them. All too often, their stories are overlooked, their voices are suppressed. How To Touch A Hot Stove features several key individuals who have been forced to grapple on a daily basis with misunderstanding and social ostracism in addition to their own inner demons. Documenting their journeys, both their day-to-day experiences (caring for themselves, coping with voices, and the like) and those issues with which they are periodically confronted (hospitalization, eviction, loss of employment, and so on), the film shows how stigma impacts their lives; the social and historical complexities of stigma (and of mental disorders themselves); and provides starting points for addressing the shame and indignities imposed upon them unwittingly by us all.
To support such testimony, the film features some of the most prominent practitioners in the mental health field reflecting on these complex questions. Interviews with Temple Grandin, Patch Adams, Dr. Oliver Sacks, Nobel Prize Laureate Dr. Eric Kandel, former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted), Joanne Greenburg (I Never Promised You a Rose Garden), and others provide key insight. The collaboration of Dr. Anne Harrington, Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, provides a compelling backdrop of the history of stigma.
For more information on the film, please visit www.hotstovefilm.com.
TWO WORLDS: ONE GOAL
A short film about youth expression in a rapidly changing Arab world
Currently in postproduction
After growing up in post-9/11 New York City, two twentysomething Americans journey through the Middle East. There, they foster close friendships and partnerships with their peers in the Arab World, finding genuine hospitality that powerfully contradicts the stereotypes and misconceptions they had found in their community and media. Meanwhile, these young Americans are immersed in a rapidly-changing, revolution-inspired Middle East, where their Arab peers – for the first time in history – have the opportunity to fight for democracy, reform and progress, through the mediums of peaceful advocacy, public art, music, social media and technological innovation.
Filmed on location in July 2011 in Amman, Jordan; Beirut, Lebanon; Cairo, Egypt; Tunis, Tunisia
Trailer coming soon!