MITCH – THE DIARY OF THE SCHIZOPHRENIC PATIENT

Mitch is an artist, Mitch is schizophrenic. That’s what he claims, facing the camera. And Mitch is his self-portrait, showing a man of 40 who uses the camera and film as a form of therapy. So (a decisive gesture here) this is about reversing perspectives, in order to follow in his footsteps. From an image about madness, we are put in the place of the subject. Mitch takes us with him on a meteoric journey through his environment, the psychiatric hospital where he lives. He films, films himself, and asks questions and wonders about sex and beauty, and he rants but also sings and performs karaoke, shouts about politics, rebels, scrutinizes, worries, and laughs too. He films with “gloves off” and without any sense of measure. But that’s not all. If Mitch is a submersion viewed by Mitch through this material put together between 2009 and 2011, with Mitch as the only operator and Damir Čučić as the initiator, it is also a journey through the margins of a country caught up in the traumatic aftermath of recent history. It is a film that is a detour facilitating a return to the centre, just like the gesture to preserve the anonymity of the people filmed, a gesture that is both simple and striking, in the form of bypassing constraints related to personal image rights: the covering of faces and bodies with drawings. Where everyone becomes a grotesque image in a world populated by dancing ghosts. (NF)  span style=”color: transparent;”>Damir CUCIC